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A Yale-led research team examined the brains of 38 couples engaged in discussion about controversial topics. For the study, the researchers from Yale and the University College of London recruited 38 adults who were asked to say whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements such as "same-sex marriage is a civil right" or "marijuana should be legalized." After matching up pairs based on their responses the researchers used an imaging technology called functional near-infrared spectroscopy to record their brain activity while they engaged in face-to-face discussions. Their findings: When two people agree, their brains exhibit a calm synchronicity of activity focused on sensory areas of the brain, such as the visual system, presumably in response to social cues from their partner. When they disagree, however, many other regions of the brain involved in higher cognitive functions become mobilized as each individual combats the other's argument. Sensory areas of the brain were less active, while activity increased in the brain's frontal lobes, home of higher order executive functions. Joy Hirsch, Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry and professor of comparative medicine and neuroscience, as well as senior author of the study, said that in discord, two brains engage many emotional and cognitive resources "like a symphony orchestra playing different music." In agreement, there "is less cognitive engagement and more social interaction between brains of the talkers, similar to a musical duet."

Author Sena Moore writes about how music can re-wire our brains for speech. Singing and speaking activate similar areas on both sides of the brain, primarily in the motor production and sensory feedback areas. Singing, however, also activates the right hemisphere in some areas more strongly than the left. Speech is a left-hemisphere-dominate function. In other words, similar networks in the brain associated with vocal production are activated when a person is singing and when s/he is speaking. And the "stronger right hemisphere" activation supports the clinical observation that those who cannot speak because of damage to the left hemisphere speech areas known as Broca's area can still produce words by singing them.

Just a few decades ago, many linguists thought the human brain had evolved a special module for language . It seemed plausible that our brains have some unique structure or system. After all, no animal can use language the way people can. However, in the 1990s, scientists began testing the language-module theory using "functional" MRI technology that let them watch the brain respond to words. And what they saw didn't look like a module, says Benjamin Bergen, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and author of the book _Louder Than Words_. "They found something totally surprising," Bergen says. "It's not just certain specific little regions in the brain, regions dedicated to language, that were lighting up. It was kind of a whole-brain type of process." The brain appears to be taking words, which are just arbitrary symbols, and translating them into things we can see or hear or do; language processing, rather than being a singular module, is "a highly distributed system" encompassing many areas of the brain. Our sensory experiences can also be applied to imagining novel concepts like "flying pigs". Our sensory capacities, ancestral features shared with our primate relatives, have been co-opted for more recent purposes, namely words and language. Bergen comments, "What evolution has done is to build a new machine, a capacity for language, something that nothing else in the known universe can do," he says. "And it's done so using the spare parts that it had lying around in the old primate brain."

Researchers have long agreed girls have superior language abilities to boys, but haven't clearly provided a biological basis to account for their differences. For the first time and in unambiguous findings, researchers show both that brain areas associated with language work harder in girls during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on very different parts of the brain when performing these tasks. Language processing is more abstract in girls, more sensory in boys.