The way Fernando Nottebohm sees it, the collection of groundbreaking discoveries he has made regarding the neural basis of vocal learning in songbirds was mostly a matter of good fortune. "A lot of it was just luck - and making hypotheses that were not tight by any means or persuasive, but that were just kind of groping in the dark and saying, 'If this is so, that might be so,'" he shrugs. "It was not a logically compelling process."
Although logic might not have been compelling, the results certainly have been. In his 40 years at Rockefeller University, Nottebohm was (among other things) the first researcher to map the neural circuits used to learn and produce birdsong, the first to uncover large anatomic sex differences in a vertebrate brain, and the first to present comprehensive evidence for neurogenesis and neuronal replacement in the adult brain.
"I wrote a chapter on ...
