Brains!

[andrewducker]

MRI scans have allowed us fascinating new insights into what goes on in brains and this Guardian article covers a few recent results.

"There's nothing else like human speech in nature. As well as the information carried by the words, you can tell someone's mood, their gender, their age and where they may come from. It's amazing," said Sophie Scott, an expert in speech neurobiology at University College London.

Among the big guns rolled out by researchers to crack the mystery of human language is the brain scanning technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Able to take snapshots of brain activity, fMRI gives an unprecedented insight into the inner workings of the brain.

Using fMRI Dr Scott has shown that the brain takes speech and separates it into words and "melody" - the varying intonation in speech that reveals mood, gender and so on. Her studies suggest words are then shunted over to the left temporal lobe for processing, while the melody is channelled to the right side of the brain, a region more stimulated by music.

Dr Johnsrude's team investigated by playing speech sounds and similar sounding non-speech sounds to people in an fMRI scanner and looked to see which part of the brain was kicked into action by speech. They found that speech was singled out for special treatment near the primary auditory cortex.

The Cambridge team is also investigating how our brains wrestle with a quirk of English - that about 80% of words have more than one meaning. Take, for example, the sentence: A shell was fired at the tank. Although the meaning is simple to grasp, the words shell, fired and tank are all ambiguous. Tests by Dr Johnsrude suggest that our brains find it far from simple to work out the meaning of such sentences, causing a flurry of activity in various parts of the brain that we take for granted.

For example, strokes often affect people's ability to speak or perceive language. But damage to different regions can have wildly different effects. Stroke damage to the right side of the brain could leave a person unable to pick up on the emotion conveyed in someone's voice, whereas damage to the left could leave them struggling to understand certain words.

Comments

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Using fMRI Dr Scott has shown that the brain takes speech and separates it into words and "melody" - the varying intonation in speech that reveals mood, gender and so on. Her studies suggest words are then shunted over to the left temporal lobe for processing, while the melody is channelled to the right side of the brain, a region more stimulated by music.

Uh, this person just found this out now? If she'd been reading any research in neuro/psycholinguistics since the 60s, she could have saved herself the trouble. This is basically an outline of what psycholinguistics is, and there are thousands of us out there researching it. fMRI is a single technique.

Insert requisite grumble about how nobody understands linguistics at all, and some smart journalist "discovers" it every few years, while actual linguists' heads explode.

Re:

[andrewducker]

Well yeah, FMRI's just the latest technique to come along, higher resolution, but not going to suddenly tell us everything we already knew was wrong.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'm even more interested in seeing what they will find when they compare the way people process different languages. Researchers have known for more than a decade that people who speak Chinese and other tonal languages process them considerably different from the way people who speak non-tonal languages do (which in part explains why perfect pitch is an exceptionally rare gift in cultures that speak non-tonal languages and almost universal among the speakers of most tonal languages).