Speaking at the Big Ideas in Neuroscience session at the recent CNS annual meeting, Angela Friederici of the Max Planck Institute discussed language as a unique human trait. Understanding of the words we use comes from different types of memories in different networks the brain. Neuroscientists often gain insight into these connections through individuals with […]
The very first way babies communicate is through gestures (well, in addition to crying, that is). They may express “I want that” as a distinct pointing toward an object. As people grow older, gestures are not abandoned, but both spoken and body language become more ambiguous. Oftentimes, adults will point and gesture while talking without […]
Does the human brain process memory like a computer processes information? What enables human language with all its nuances and complexities? How does flexibility in the brain give rise to learning? These were just a few of the questions explored at Big Ideas in Cognitive Neuroscience, a special session at this year’s CNS meeting in […]
Guest Post by Angela Grant, Pennsylvania State University Over the last few years, you may have noticed a surfeit of articles covering current research on bilingualism. Some of them suggest that bilingualism “sharpens the mind,” while other titles are clearly intended to provoke more doubt than confidence: “Is Bilingualism Really an Advantage?”. The pendulum swing […]
Implicit bias, plasticity, and language were front and center in the most popular CNS stories of 2016. From using neuroscience findings to help understand and reduce bias to exploring why some people learn a second language more easily than others to recent debates over neuroimaging techniques, cognitive neuroscientists continue to chart new territory in their […]
Outside of superintelligence thrillers like Lucy or Limitless, it’s rare to have a popular Hollywood blockbuster explore a sliver of cognitive neuroscience. Even rarer is for that sliver to involve language science, which is why I was thrilled to see linguistics front and center in Arrival. Aside from it being an intelligent, well-acted, and fun […]
Guest Post by Angela Grant, Pennsylvania State University Do you remember the last time you took a language course? No matter if it was online or classroom based, immersive or translation focused, I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that your language abilities when you left that course were different from […]
Imagine trying to read a word – even this very sentence – and the letters all looking like a jumbled mess. You can see letters but they no longer make sense. This recently happened to patients who were in a unique study to investigate the origins of reading in the brain. These patients, who had […]
In every conversation you have, there is an unspoken code – a set of social rules that guide you. When to stop talking, where to look, when to listen and when to talk… While scientists have long understood this turn-taking behavior, less known has been what affects this ability in patients with aphasia, a disorder […]
Actions may speak more melodically than sounds. A new study shows that playing a melody on a musical instrument enhances how those melodies are perceived and remembered, above and beyond just listening to them. “We wanted to understand how the auditory system encodes and responds to musical events that the motor system has learned, says […]
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