I have been told that the temporal lobe in the human brain is responsible for auditory processing and thus the understanding and appreciation of music. My birds appear to respond to music in a different way from how human’s do (IE, relaxing music makes them excited and music that is supposed to make a human get up and dance causes them to fall asleep.)
So do they have a brain structure that is even remotely similar to the human temporal lobe? Or do they just react to vibrations?
The short answer is yes, they do have brain structures responsible for the interpretation and processing of sounds (consider the complex auditory cues that most songbirds have to sort out). The long answer can be found in this .pdf document (“Processing of Natural Sounds in the Auditory Forebrain of Songbirds”).
Bird brains are rather different from mammalian brains, so the nomenclature of brain anatomy is often quite different, as well (and, avian brain anatomy nomenclature is currently undergoing a transformation, leading to further confusion, depending on the date of a given reference. See here for more than you ever probably wanted to know about the issues surrounding avian brain nomenclature).
I was going to point out that many brain structures evolved in both the bird and the mammal lineages after their last common ancestor. So while both birds and mammals process information, they do so with different structures. So while a bird may have something that functions like a temporal lobe, they do not, in fact, have a temporal lobe in the same sense as mammals. If you turn this around, mammals don’t have the brain processors that birds do. We’re using different hardware to accomplish similar ends. It’s like the ear structure - there’s no question that both mammals and birds can hear sounds well, but the structure of their ears is quite, quite different - as just one example, mammals have three inner ear bones and, if I recall correctly, birds have only one. But both systems work.