Michale Fee and his colleagues created the cooling device using technology similar to that used in portable electronic beverage coolers. They say that it could be used to study other complex behaviors, such as walking or swimming.

"We can also use this cooling technology to discover which brain regions control the timing of different complex behaviors in different animals, something that has been very difficult to assess until now," Fee said in the release. "We know that HVC is related in some ways to [the] human cortex, so it could be showing us a very general mechanism for representing the passage of time within the brain."

The research was published today in the journal Nature.