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Localizing Language In the Brain
RogerRoast writes "A new study by MIT scientists pinpoints areas of the brain used exclusively for language (PDF), providing a partial answer to a longstanding debate in cognitive science. According to the study, there are parts of our brain dedicated to language and only language. After having their subjects perform the initial language task, which they call a 'functional localizer,' they had each one do a subset of seven other experiments: one on exact arithmetic, two on working memory, three on cognitive control, and one on music; since these are the functions 'most commonly argued to share neural machinery with language.' The authors say the results don't imply that every cognitive function has its own dedicated piece of cortex; after all, we're able to learn new skills, so there must be some parts of the brain that are both high-level and functionally flexible."
there are parts of our brain dedicated to language and only language.
And there are parts of my brain dedicated to spotting that kind of redundancy and all other kinds of redundancy.
If we get multiple areas, are they next to each other?
Does it make a difference if you learn the second language when you are young, or later in life?
Finally, what about computer languages such as Perl/C++/Java etc. Are they treated the same as English/Spanish/etc. or more like Math?
Sorry, no answers here, just more questions.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
For those who need a bit of background about what this is all about, and why this study is so important to the study of cognitive linguistics, we turn to a bit of history.
Linguistics has always been closely intertwined with psychology. So much so, in fact, that both modern cognitive linguistics and psychology approaches stem from reactions to an idea called behaviorism. Everyone's 'favorite' linguist, Noam Chomsky, was one of the first to try and go beyond behaviorism's explanations. Much has been said and written, and I won't go into that whole mess, but suffice to say after the dust settled Chomsky had decided that the human acquisition of language is very much an innate property of our species, something inherent in our brains, which he would come to refer to as the 'black box' that just acquires language like a sponge that dries up after a certain age in childhood. Once again, the whole debate around this topic is what cognitive linguistics is currently bent on figuring out--a question that has existed since man first wondered "why language?"
Anyway, before this becomes a true wall of text, I'll come down to what this study means to cognitive science: the two camps directly affected by this study are named 'nativists,' who believe that the human brain has structures specifically designed for the acquisition, processing, and production of language, and the other side are called 'structuralists,' who believe that the natural human proclivity for pattern recognition is naturally reinforced during language acquisition, bootstrapping its own language recognition abilities by simply recognizing patterns. Pinpointing specific, exclusive areas for language supports the nativist conclusion, dealing a blow to the structuralist theory. Evolution at work, perhaps?
Quote: "Researchers in Israel, Canada and France used brain imaging to observe the neural activity of eight blind subjects as they read Braille. They found that although the blind subjects were using their sense of touch, their brains showed activity in the same so-called visual region that sighted people use when they read."
More at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-reading-region
- "Every demand is a prison, and wisdom is only free when it asks nothing." Sir Betrand Russell
Yet another fMRI study finds that fluid movement in the brain changes based on activity. Doesn't show that area of the brain is doing any work.
As someone who does neuroimaging research, what appears to be exciting about this approach to fMRI is that it is on an individual-by-individual basis, not at a group level (which is mentioned in the MITNews article). Almost all fMRI work is at a group level. While I perform some group analyses, most of my work is on an individual basis (but I do structural imaging, not functional). Group analyses can have severe limitations that are not always discussed by the researchers and are almost never understood by people outside the field of neuroimaging.
From the article: "It’s the same way for brains. 'Brains are different in their folding patterns, and where exactly the different functional areas fall relative to these patterns,' Fedorenko says. 'The general layout is similar, but there isn’t fine-grained matching.' So, she says, analyzing data by 'aligning brains in some common space is just never going to be quite right. Ideally, then, data would be analyzed for each subject individually; that is, patterns of activity in one brain would only ever be compared to patterns of activity from that same brain."
This process of aligning brains is called registration. Even if you are just working within one subject, there is registration involved (between the functional scan, in this case, and the structural - so you know what part of the brain is being activated). I spend about 25% of my imaging work dealing with checking registrations or trying to improve registrations. It's really a key step in neuroimaging work, one that not enough researchers consider seriously enough. So that's why this approach to fMRI is interesting - the researchers are trying to minimize the effects of poor registration, which can lead to completely invalid results.
The summary links to a reply of a critique of a 2009 paper. The original paper (with brain imaging goodness) can be found here.
I tried to learn Japanese for years nothing stuck. Academic study of this subject now bores me and as soon as I open the book I could sleep for a week. I need some Paul McKenna NLP training to make me an obsessive compulsive I think.
Lazy, too right I am.
I just watched this @Google talk yesterday, which finds wide variation in the way people think about various tasks. It doesn't contradict the findings of this MIT team, it just shows how variable and "plastic" these functions can be. One example that comes to mind is students from one country (France, IIRC) showed a lot of activation in the hearing areas of the brain when doing simple arithmetic tasks. They said this was because they learned arithmetic through rote repetition of tables, and thus used those aural regions when doing the tasks. (They also said they preferred doing math problems in a quiet environment to avoid distraction.)
IANA neuro-scientist, I just enjoy learning about this stuff. For any other armchair brain enthusiasts out there, you might also enjoy this lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
there was an article?
Do parrots and dolphins and other species which use language show the same results?
After having their subjects perform the initial language task, which they call a 'functional localizer,' they had each one do a subset of seven other experiments:
They could have just monitored a Geek trying to talk to a sexy girl and look for the part of the brain that shut down.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
For an article about brain imaging, why are there no pictures? And without pictures why would I want to look at it? I need my pictures!
I was lucky enough to hear Nancy Kanwisher give a talk summarising her lab's work, it's all pretty impressive. There are some ingenious experiments in there, yet they are still comprehensible to non-neuroscientists.
http://web.mit.edu/bcs/nklab/
There is something odd about research out of MIT. They seem to really like the idea that there are parts of the brain that innately do one specific thing (well, at least Nancy Kanwisher does, and she is on this paper). It is pretty much ridiculous to argue that we have have a unique reading area of the brain since it is something the human race hasn't been doing that long. It wouldn't surprise me if the same brain regions are used in most people to read, but it is very odd to assume that one brain region would basically be useless or taken over by other regions for a large number of humans. Functional specificity makes sense for motor cortex and primary sensory receiving areas, but not something as high level as reading.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
The study the article talks about has not been accepted for publication yet. So this seems to be more of a puff piece to generate interest, really it bugs me when scientists do this. Without the study it's i/possible to tell whether there are any problems with their metfhodology.
One thing I've always though was that it has less to do with language per se and more to do with organization of expresion. What specific types of math or music tests were they using. Is it possible that areas that light up duri.g sentence construction also light up during composition of music and not just listening tasks? Would the same areas light up during algebra not when the person is solving a simple question but when a person is transforming an expression fromone form to another. What about during arrangement of pbrases in music in contrast to melody construction?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Or so says Casey Schwartz of Brown University http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/08/07/why-it-s-smart-to-be-bilingual.html My three children were raised speaking their mother's tongue (French). And like the kids in the article, they seem smarter.
On the flip side, I'm also bilingual, but sort of like an Apple "Power PC", speaking both languages seems to make me worse at either.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone
Gently reply
We all know that modern English is an amalgamation of Saxon (non-latin deutch, like Dutch Netherlands and such), Norse (hindian), French (latin) and all this is basically extension ontop of the original roots of Anglo (Engles Brittania); However, here is what I want to know about those MRI scans: how does MRI report of someone who relearned the branches of modern English particularly when that Union shared similar construction from other languages, how does the brain behave when development to those branches was after that LAD period? If somone learns modern English from childhood, then far into life they learn Dutch and Norse and French and Angle then surely their brain will notice loan-words in addition to the bag of words specific to the language being used?
what's an "article"?
Something to do with clothes?
used exclusively for language ... a subset of seven other experiments ... since these are the functions 'most commonly argued to share neural machinery with language.'
We eliminated several hypotheses that oppose ours, now we will see how far vulgarizations will go to claim that we proved our own hypothesis!