Erich D. Jarvis

Erich D. Jarvis

Erich Jarvis is a neurobiologist at the Duke University Medical Center. He leads a team of researchers who study the neurobiology of vocal learning, a critical behavioral substrate for spoken language. The animal models he studies include songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds. Like humans, these bird groups have the ability to learn new sounds and pass on their vocal repertoires culturally, from one generation to the next. Jarvis focuses on the molecular pathways involved in the perception and production of learned vocalizations, and the development of brain circuits for vocal learning. To accomplish this objective, Dr. Jarvis takes an integrative approach to research, combining behavioral, anatomical, electrophysiological, and molecular biological techniques. The discoveries of Dr. Jarvis and his collaborators include the first findings of natural behaviorally regulated gene expression in the brain, social context dependent gene regulation, convergent vocal learning systems across distantly related animal groups, the FoxP2 gene in vocal learning birds, and the recent finding that vocal learning systems may have evolved out of ancient motor learning systems.

In 2002, the National Science Foundation awarded Jarvis its highest honor for a young researcher, the Alan T. Waterman Award. In 2005 he was awarded the National Institutes of Health Director´s Pioneer Award providing funding for five years to researchers pursuing innovative approaches to biomedical research. In 2008 Dr. Jarvis was selected to the prestigious position of Investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

Dr. Jarvis received his undergraduate training in Biology and Mathematics at Hunter College in New York City (1988) and his doctorate in Molecular Neurobiology and Animal Behavior from the Rockefeller University in New York City (1995).

Evolution of neural systems: complex behavioral traits

In this modern view, vertebrate brain evolution is not thought to occur in linear stages, but in a multidimensional fashion as a package of regions that are conserved or differentially modified in different vertebrate groups. From this view, my research group has derived a motor theory on the evolution of brain pathways for complex behavioral traits, and in particular the trait of vocal learning, a critical behavioral substrate for spoken language.

We suggest that vertebrate forebrains have two basic interacting sub-pathways, a motor production pathway and a motor learning pathway, from which brain pathways for song and speech learning in birds and humans emerge. In this regard, a mechanism of evolution of new neural systems for complex behavioral traits appears to occur by taking on old neural system, hooking it up to an old organ, to then form a new complex behavior.