Masakazu (Mark) Konishi
Scientist who investigated how owls hear and locate their prey
MASAKAZU (MARK) KONISHI, who has died aged 87, was a scientist whose investigations into how birds develop their songs and sense of hearing made him pre-eminent in the field of neuroethology
– the study of the relationship between animals’ nervous systems and their observable behaviour.
Though previous scientists had conducted experiments to gauge how birds interact with their environment and with one other, Konishi was among the first to deploy technology that could map the neural pathways in the avian brain.
In 1975 when he became a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Konishi arrived with 21 owls and a determination to build upon the work of the US biologist Roger Payne, who had written his thesis on how barn owls use their sense of hearing to locate prey.
To this end a soundproof acoustic chamber was built on-site, equipped with a remote-controlled loudspeaker that moved around the owl’s head. Working with Eric Knudsen, Konishi discovered that certain auditory neurons in owls’ brains responded only when a sound was coming from a particular location.
This finding allowed the two scientists to plot an “auditory space map” in the brain that allows owls to determine an object’s location with speed and precision, and thus to hunt even in complete darkness.
It was the first time that anyone had proved the existence of such a “map”, and it proved to be a key step towards understanding how the brain of any animal species learns to “read” its environment, allowing the instantaneous recognition of (for example) faces.
In 2005 Konishi and Knudsen received the Neuroscience Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation in recognition of their work.
Masakazu Konishi was born in Kyoto, Japan on February 17 1933, and developed his interest in animals on family trips to the zoo. Despite significant financial and social disadvantages – his parents were weavers, and had received little formal education – he passed the entrance exams to Hokkaido University, graduating with a degree in science in 1958. He learnt English through classes at the American Cultural Center in Sapporo, and through making friends with US army officers and diplomats.
For his PHD he studied birdsong under the Britishborn expert Peter Marler, manipulating recordings of birds and playing them back to see how his test subjects reacted. He decided to focus on how altering auditory feedback – by deafening birds with white noise, or surgically removing the cochleas in their ears – affected their responses to stimuli.
His experiments showed that deafened songbirds such as the white-crowned sparrow produce abnormal songs, and that the effect is most profound when deafness is induced at a young age.
Before moving to America in the 1970s to take up a position at the University of California, Berkeley, he also spent time at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, taking part in early attempts to analyse neurons in the visual cortices of cats.
Masakazu Konishi – who Westernised his first name to Mark upon reaching America – became Caltech’s Bing professor of behavioural biology in 1980, holding the position until his retirement in 2013. In later life he enjoyed training border collies to herd sheep.
He received numerous awards, including the 1990 International Prize for Biology – established in honour of Japan’s emperor Shōwa. Subsequently he was invited to dine with Shōwa’s son Akihito and Akihito’s wife, the empress Michiko. Konishi found the empress to be “charming”; when reports emerged of her mental health difficulties he sent her a recording of European nightingales, receiving a handwritten thank-you note in reply.
Masakazu (Mark) Konishi, born February 17 1933, died July 23 2020