14 DAY TRIAL // Novel human and animal studies released yesterday at Neuroscience 2010, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, reveal the complex brain wiring used in the communication process.
The research gives insight into the way that the brain processes and produces sounds, language and accents, but also into the brain abnormalities in people with language and speech problems, like stuttering, for example.
Nina Dronkers, PhD, discovered that the network of brain connections that are vital for understanding language is far more complex than was previously thought.
Along with her team, she mapped language areas in the brains of people with or without language problems, and identified new speech-related pathways.
Patricia Bestelmeyer, PhD, focused on accents and found that people process differently words spoken in their native accent, compared with other accents, and this might be a plausible explanation to the communication difficulties and social inferences related to foreign accents.
Kate Watkins, PhD, and Soo-Eun Chang, PhD, studied stuttering, and found that people who stutter, have abnormal brain activity even when they are reading or listening, which implies that stuttering is not a speech problem only related to production, but to speech processing too.
Another interesting fact is that men who stutter have brain connections different from those of women who stutter, and this could be the reason why there are five more adult stuttering than women.
Frederic Theunissen, PhD, focused on birds and discovered that brain cells in songbirds capture communicative sounds and respond to them even when they are mixed with background noise.
This research actually shows how people can manage to focus on a certain conversation in a loud room (this is also called the 'cocktail party effect').
Communication is a very complex process and it includes a wide series of tasks, going from processing and understanding sounds, to making jaw movements.
There are currently 46 million Americans suffering from some form of communication impairment and this research could help doctors understand better the brain circuits that are involved in the communication process.
Press conference moderator Steven L. Small, MD, PhD, of the University of Chicago, an expert on language and the brain, said that “communication is our means of expressing thoughts, feelings, and emotions — and today's research not only provides valuable clues to how the brain tackles this vital task, but also gives insight into how we might address and treat communication problems.