Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA.
Division of Geology and Planetary Science, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, 91125, USA.
Sci Rep. 2023 Jan 24;13(1):1324. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-28444-z.
A compelling question at the intersection of physics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology concerns the extent to which the brains of various species evolved to encode regularities of the physical world. It would be parsimonious and adaptive, for example, for brains to evolve an innate understanding of gravity and the laws of motion, and to be able to detect, auditorily, those patterns of noises that ambulatory creatures make when moving about the world. One such physical regularity of the world is fractal structure, generally characterized by power-law correlations or 1/f spectral distributions. Such laws are found broadly in nature and human artifacts, from noise in physical systems, to coastline topography (e.g., the Richardson effect), to neuronal spike patterns. These distributions have also been found to hold for the rhythm and power spectral density of a wide array of human music, suggesting that human music incorporates regularities of the physical world that our species evolved to recognize and produce. Here we show for the first time that 1/f laws also govern the spectral density of a wide range of animal vocalizations (music), from songbirds, to whales, to howling wolves. We discovered this 1/f power-law distribution in the vocalizations within all of the 17 diverse species examined. Our results demonstrate that such power laws are prevalent in the animal kingdom, evidence that their brains have evolved a sensitivity to them as an aid in processing sensory features of the natural world.
在物理学、神经科学和进化生物学的交叉领域，有一个引人关注的问题，即各种物种的大脑在多大程度上进化为编码物理世界的规律。例如，大脑进化出对重力和运动定律的先天理解，并能够听觉检测到生物在世界上移动时发出的那些模式的噪声，这将是简约和适应性的。世界的一种物理规律是分形结构，通常具有幂律相关性或 1/f 谱分布。这些定律在自然界和人类制品中广泛存在，从物理系统中的噪声到海岸线地形（例如，理查德森效应）到神经元尖峰模式。这些分布也适用于广泛的人类音乐的节奏和功率谱密度，这表明人类音乐包含了我们的物种进化出来以识别和产生的物理世界的规律性。在这里，我们首次表明，1/f 定律也支配着广泛的动物发声（音乐）的光谱密度，从鸣禽到鲸鱼到嚎叫的狼。我们在所有 17 个不同物种的发声中发现了这种 1/f 幂律分布。我们的结果表明，这种幂律在动物王国中很普遍，这表明它们的大脑已经进化出对这些规律的敏感性，作为处理自然世界感官特征的一种辅助手段。
