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For the study, conducted by Dr. John Hutton, a researcher and pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and someone with an interest in emergent literacy, 27 children around age 4 went into an FMRI machine. They were presented with the same story in three conditions: audio only; the illustrated pages of a storybook with an audio voiceover; and an animated cartoon. While the children paid attention to the stories, the MRI, the machine scanned for activation within certain brain networks, and connectivity between the networks. Here's what researchers found: In the audio-only condition (too cold): language networks were activated, but there was less connectivity overall. "There was more evidence the children were straining to understand." In the animation condition (too hot): there was a lot of activity in the audio and visual perception networks, but not a lot of connectivity among the various brain networks. "The language network was working to keep up with the story," says Hutton. "Our interpretation was that the animation was doing all the work for the child. They were expending the most energy just figuring out what it means." The children's comprehension of the story was the worst in this condition. The illustration condition was what Hutton called "just right".When children could see illustrations, language-network activity dropped a bit compared to the audio condition. Instead of only paying attention to the words, Hutton says, the children's understanding of the story was "scaffolded" by having the images as clues. Most importantly, in the illustrated book condition, researchers saw increased connectivity between - and among - all the networks they were looking at: visual perception, imagery, default mode and language. One interesting note is that, because of the constraints of an MRI machine, which encloses and immobilizes your body, the story-with-illustrations condition wasn't actually as good as reading on Mom or Dad's lap. The emotional bon

This article is about how scientists are discussing an A.I. that could translate thoughts into speech through MRI scans. A study was done on three people and analyzed their brain patterns as they listened to words and phrases in order to understand what part of the brain lights up when that word/phrase is said. They also used an A.I to translate MRI scans into words and phrases. However, the A.I.'s translation is doesn't make sense. While the result wasn't perfect, it discovered that the A.I can also decode meaning and imagination. While this is beginning of this kind of A.I. technology, it's possible that in the future, they will be able to decode our thoughts.

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."

(This article was by my college friend, Quinn Eastman, who's a trained scientist and science writer for Emory University.) Listening to metaphors involving arms or legs loops in a region of the brain responsible for visual perception of those body parts, scientists have discovered. The finding, recently published in Brain & Language, is another example of how neuroscience studies are providing evidence for "grounded cognition" - the idea that comprehension of abstract concepts in the brain is built upon concrete experiences, a proposal whose history extends back millennia to Aristotle. When study participants heard sentences that included phrases such as "shoulder responsibility," "foot the bill" or "twist my arm", they tended to engage a region of the brain called the left extrastriate body area or EBA. The same level of activation was not seen when participants heard literal sentences containing phrases with a similar meaning, such as "take responsibility" or "pay the bill." The study included 12 right-handed, English-speaking people, and blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). "The EBA is part of the extrastriate visual cortex, and it was known to be involved in identifying body parts," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "We found that the metaphor selectivity of the EBA matches its visual selectivity." The EBA was not activated when study participants heard literal, non-metaphorical sentences describing body parts. "This suggests that deep semantic processing is needed to recruit the EBA, over and above routine use of the words for body parts," Sathian says. Sathian's research team had previously observed that metaphors involving the sense of touch, such as "a rough day", activate a region of the brain important for sensing texture. In addition, other researchers have shown t

"They scanned a total of 79 trainees, just before they started to learn the "All-London" Knowledge [memorizing "25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks and places of interest"], which can take between two and four years to complete. ... those who had attempted the Knowledge had increased the size of the posterior hippocampus - the rear section of the hippocampus which lies at the front of the brain. ... this advantage appeared to come at a price, as the non-cabbies outperformed them in other memory tasks, such as recalling complex visual information." The full study: http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/4398.full.pdf+html

The human voice appears to trigger pleasure circuits in the brains of typical kids, but not children with autism, a Stanford University team reports. The finding could explain why many children with autism seem indifferent to spoken words. The Stanford team used functional MRI to compare the brains of 20 children who had autism spectrum disorders and 19 typical kids. In typical kids there was a strong connection between areas that respond to the human voice and areas that release the feel-good chemical dopamine, but that connection was reduced in autistic children. Connections between voice areas and areas involved in emotion-related learning also were weaker, creating greater communication difficulties. The new study's suggestion that motivation is the problem could explain why speech often comes late to children with autism even though the brain circuit involved in processing spoken words seems to function normally; the reward circuitry isn't working the way it does in typical children.

Dyslexia stems from physiological differences in the brain circuitry. Those differences can make it harder, and less efficient, for children to process the tiny components of language, called phonemes. Using cutting-edge MRI technology, the researchers are able to pinpoint a specific neural pathway, a white matter tract in the brain's left hemisphere that appears to be related to dyslexia: It's called the arcuate fasciculus. "It's an arch-shaped bundle of fibers that connects the frontal language areas of the brain to the areas in the temporal lobe that are important for language," Elizabeth Norton, a neuroscientist at MIT's McGovern Institute of Brain Research, explains.

Researchers from King's College London Institute of Psychiatry, in collaboration with Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the University of Barcelona, mapped the neural pathways involved in word learning among humans. They found that the arcuate fasciculus, a collection of nerve fibres connecting auditory regions at the temporal lobe with the motor area located at the frontal lobe in the left hemisphere of the brain, allows the 'sound' of a word to be connected to the regions responsible for its articulation. Differences in the development of these auditory-motor connections may explain differences in people's ability to learn words. Researchers used diffusion tensor imaging to image the structure of the brain before a word learning task and functional MRI, to detect the regions in the brain that were most active during the task. They found a strong relationship between the ability to remember words and the structure of arcuate fasciculus, which connects two brain areas: the territory of Wernicke, related to auditory language decoding, and Broca's area, which coordinates the movements associated with speech and the language processing. In participants able to learn words more successfully their arcuate fasciculus was more myelinated i.e. the nervous tissue facilitated faster conduction of the electrical signal. In addition the activity between the two regions was more co-ordinated in these participants. Dr Catani concludes, "Now we understand that this is how we learn new words, our concern is that children will have less vocabulary as much of their interaction is via screen, text and email rather than using their external prosthetic memory. This research reinforces the need for us to maintain the oral tradition of talking to our children."

A 2022 University of Cambridge study conducted by Sahakian, Langley, Chen, et al., and published in the journal _Neurology_, shows that that social isolation is linked to changes in brain structure and cognition - the mental process of acquiring knowledge - it even carries an increased risk of dementia in older adults. Previous research established that brain regions consistently involved in diverse social interactions are strongly linked to networks that support cognition, including the default mode network (which is active when we are not focusing on the outside world), the salience network (which helps us select what we pay attention to), the subcortical network (involved in memory, emotion and motivation) and the central executive network (which enables us to regulate our emotions). This particular study examined how social isolation affects grey matter - brain regions in the outer layer of the brain, consisting of neurons. It investigated data from nearly 500,000 people from the UK Biobank, with a mean age of 57. People were classified as socially isolated if they were living alone, had social contact less than monthly and participated in social activities less than weekly. The study also included neuroimaging (MRI) data from approximately 32,000 people. That data revealed that socially isolated people had poorer cognition, including in memory and reaction time, and lower volume of grey matter in many parts of the brain. These areas included the temporal region (which processes sounds and helps encode memory), the frontal lobe (which is involved in attention, planning and complex cognitive tasks) and the hippocampus - a key area involved in learning and memory, which is typically disrupted early in Alzheimer's disease. We also found a link between the lower grey matter volumes and specific genetic processes that are involved in Alzheimer's disease. Follow-ups with participants 12 years later showed that those who were socially isolated, but not

Researchers from Brown University and King's College London have uncovered new details about how brain anatomy influences language development in young kids. Using advanced MRI, they find that different parts of the brain appear to be important for language development at different ages. Their study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that the explosion of language acquisition that typically occurs in children between 2 and 4 years old is not reflected in substantial changes in brain asymmetry. Structures that support language ability tend to be localized on the left side of the brain. For that reason, the researchers expected to see more myelin -- the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers and helps electrical signals zip around the brain -- developing on the left side in children entering the critical period of language acquisition. Surprisingly, anatomy did not predict language very well between the ages of 2 and 4, when language ability increases quickly. "What we actually saw was that the asymmetry of myelin was there right from the beginning, even in the youngest children in the study, around the age of 1," said the study's lead author, Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh, the Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London. "Rather than increasing, those asymmetries remained pretty constant over time." That finding, the researchers say, underscores the importance of environment during this critical period for language. While asymmetry in myelin remained constant over time, the relationship between specific asymmetries and language ability did change, the study found. To investigate that relationship, the researchers compared the brain scans to a battery of language tests given to each child in the study. The comparison showed that asymmetries in different parts of the brain appear to predict language ability at different ages. "Regions of the brain that weren't important to successful language in toddlers became more important i