{"id":46589,"date":"2016-04-25T14:41:48","date_gmt":"2016-04-25T18:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uncommongoods.com\/?p=46589"},"modified":"2016-04-26T10:47:34","modified_gmt":"2016-04-26T14:47:34","slug":"uncommon-knowledge-animal-kingdoms-best-dance-crew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/2016\/uncommon-knowledge-animal-kingdoms-best-dance-crew\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncommon Knowledge: Who Is The Animal Kingdom\u2019s Best Dance Crew?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/product\/boogie-monster-dance-kit?source=blog_uk042516\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-46590 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/21125_uk042516.jpg\" alt=\"21125_uk042516\" width=\"650\" height=\"520\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Snowball the cockatoo was left at an Indiana animal rescue center with a note from his owner. \u201cSnowball likes to dance to this,\u201d it said, referring to what was also left: a Backstreet Boys CD.<\/p>\n<p>In 2007, Neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel stumbled upon a YouTube video of the bird, who appeared to be getting down to the boy band\u2019s \u201cEverybody.\u201d If this bird were actually grooving to the beat, he wondered, it might have circuits in the brain for processing rhythm similar to ours.<\/p>\n<p>So Patel paid a visit to Snowball and created an experiment to determine whether he was truly dancing\u2014characterized by synchronized movements\u2014or just looked like he was. Patel remixed the song at 11 different tempos, then recorded what Snowball did when his jam came on. For nine out of the 11 variations, he bobbed enthusiastically in sync (no pun intended)\u2014well enough to consider him the first-ever nonhuman \u201cdancer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Inspired by Snowball\u2019s fancy footwork, Adena Schachner, then a psychology grad student at Harvard, went back to YouTube and narrowed thousands of clips of animals purportedly dancing to just 39 who seemed to genuinely synchronize. Twenty-nine were parrots, like Snowball, and the rest were Asian elephants, deeming a recreation of Dirty Dancing\u2019s \u201cthe lift\u201d highly unlikely.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/product\/boogie-monster-dance-kit?source=blog_uk042516\">Boogie Monster Dance Kit<\/a> | $40<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Snowball the cockatoo was left at an Indiana animal rescue center with a note from his owner. \u201cSnowball likes&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":46590,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1208],"tags":[1042,1950,813],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46589"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46589"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46591,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46589\/revisions\/46591"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}