From perception to action in songbird production: dynamics of a whole loop.

Birdsong emerges when a set of highly interconnected brain areas manage to generate a complex output. This consists of precise respiratory rhythms as well as motor instructions to control the vocal organ configuration. In this way, during birdsong production, dedicated cortical areas interact with life-supporting ones in the brainstem, such as the respiratory nuclei. We discuss an integrative view of this interaction together with a widely accepted "top-down" representation of the song system. We also show that a description of this neural network in terms of dynamical systems allows to explore songbird production and processing by generating testable predictions.