we're more like bats than we might think
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a new study from uc berkeley shines a light on how we socialize. (getty)
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a new study on the communication patterns of bats could help us understand the way we interact with others — and could even lay some of the groundwork for improving human mental health.
the research, published in the journal science, comes from the university of california, berkeley’s neurobat lab. researchers studied how egyptian fruit bats’ brains process complex information when they’re in large groups by putting wireless neural recording devices and wireless vibration sensors around the bats’ necks like necklaces.
“these vibration sensors, paired with our ability to wirelessly record neural data from multiple bats at the same time, allowed us to create this experiment in which the bats could freely behave and spontaneously communicate,” boaz styr, a postdoctoral researcher in the neurobat lab and one of the study’s co-authors, told berkeley’s news outlet.
observing the neural data, they found that the neurons activated in the frontal cortex (which, as in humans, regulates social behaviour) were different, depending on which bat was making noise.
“what these individual neurons cared about was, ‘am i making the call? or is somebody else making the call?,’ no matter what type of vocalization it was,” styr said. “other neurons were only sensitive to when one specific bat within the group was talking.”
a previous study published by the neurobat lab found that bats’ brains “sync up” when they’re communicating: there are correlations in their brain activity when they’re making noise, fighting, grooming or sniffing each other. “the inter-brain correlations were so strong that you could easily see them in the raw data,” one of the researchers said when the work was published in 2019. “this is the first time in my career where a result was so robust that it popped out from the data like that.”
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the new study found that the degree to which the bats’ brains synced up depended on which bat was “talking,” indicating that some bats have good relationships with one another.
“bats can recognize and have stable social relationships with other individual bats, even over long periods of time and in different circumstances,” maimon rose, one of the study’s co-authors, told berkeley’s news outlet.
bats are very social, and often live in caves with “thousands of squabbling roommates,” as berkeley news put it: they fight over things like food, mates, and places to sleep.
“these bats are very long-lived — they live about 25 years — and basically their entire lives are spent in this group social living,” neurobiology and bioengineering professor michael yartsev said. “so, the ability to live together in a group and communicate with each other is an inherent feature of their lives.”
the study also looked at the social dynamics of the group, and found that just as in humans, some bats were more sociable than others. the bats who were better at socializing caused more brain synchrony within the group, while the ones who spent more time on their own, away from the larger group, got a less accurate neural representation of their identity from the others.
“it seems that the behaviour of the out-of-cluster bats really shifts their neural representation in the brains of the other bats,” rose said.
yartsev added that understanding why some people find socializing easy while others are consistently awkward and ostracized could offer significant help in improving our own mental health.
“often, in neuroscience, we like to take a simplified approach and focus on one component of a complex process at a time,” yartsev said. “but in reality, the social world is complex… our brains, and those of animals, have evolved for, and constantly struggle with, the complexity of real life. i personally believe that to truly understand the brain, we need to embrace this complexity, rather than fear it.”
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