Category Archives: Cognitive Neuroscience of Language

Individuals with episodic amnesia are not stuck in time

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Carl F. Craver, Donna Kwan, Chloe Steindam, R. Shayna Rosenbaum: Individuals with episodic amnesia are not stuck in time. Neuropsychologia 57, May 2014, Pages 191 -195.

“The idea that episodic memory is required for temporal consciousness is common in science, philosophy, fiction, and everyday life. Related ideas follow naturally: that individuals with episodic amnesia are lost mariners, stuck in time, in a “permanent present tense” or “lost in a non-time, a sort of instantaneous present”. Yet recent evidence suggests that people with episodic amnesia are not stuck in time. Episodic memory and future thought are dissociable from semantic knowledge of time, attitudes about time, and consideration of future consequences in decision-making. These findings illustrate how little is known about the sense of time in episodic amnesia and suggest that the human sense of time is likely not one thing, but many things.” 

A blueprint for how to build a human brain

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From a recent press release of the Allen Institute for Brain Science announcing the first major report on the  BrainSpan Atlas of the Developing Human Brain.

“Knowing where a gene is expressed in the brain can provide powerful clues about what its role is,” says Ed Lein, Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science.  “This atlas gives a comprehensive view of which genes are on and off in which specific nuclei and cell types while the brain is developing during pregnancy. This means that we have a blueprint for human development: an understanding of the crucial pieces necessary for the brain to form in a normal, healthy way, and a powerful way to investigate what goes wrong in disease.”

Audio from NPR: Map of the developing brain

Visualizing genes’ role in learning and memory

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From Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence

“MIT bioengineers have adapted MRI to visualize gene activity inside the brains of living animals.Tracking these genes with MRI would enable scientists to learn more about how the genes control processes such as forming memories and learning new skills, says Alan Jasanoff, an MIT associate professor of biological engineering and leader of the research team.”

“The dream of molecular imaging is to provide information about the biology of intact organisms, at the molecule level,” says Jasanoff, who is also an associate member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “The goal is to not have to chop up the brain, but instead to actually see things that are happening inside.”

The neural code that makes us human

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From Science : Yosef Grodzinsky and Israel Nelken comment on Nima Mesgarani’s et al. recent finding about phonetic feature encoding in the human superior temporal gyrus.

Access from Hebrew University Website. 

“Speech representation in the auditory cortex … is governed by acoustic features, but not by just any acoustic features—the features that dominate speech representation are precisely those that are associated with abstract, linguistically defined distinctive features. Mesgarani et al., who base their investigation on linguistic distinctions, further demonstrate that features are distinguishable by the degree of the neural invariance they evoke, forming an order that is remarkably in keeping with old linguistic observations: Manner of articulation (manifesting early in developing children) produces a neural invariance that is more prominent than that related to place of articulation (manifesting late in children). A hierarchy noted in 1941 for language acquisition is now resurfacing as part of the neural sensitivity to speech sounds.”

What is so interesting about Mesgarani’s et al. finding is that they identified neural correlates of the very same phonetic features that had been posited by linguists who were stating generalizations about the sound patterns of natural languages. The pioneers in this field were Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoi. Jakobson and Trubetzkoi worked from their armchairs. But, with their razor-sharp analytic minds, they saw abstract patterns in natural languages. Since the patterns were so abstract, it is unlikely that they would have been discovered by neuroscientists alone. Experts on languages needed to see the patterns and develop theories of how they could be generated by a combinatorial mechanism of features. At that point, the question of neural correlates for the representation of speech sounds could be asked in a meaningful way. To be sure, Mesgarani et al. did NOT find the neural code that makes us human. That’s exaggerated. But their work is a model of how insights from linguistics might be ‘transferred’ to cognitive neuroscience.

Phonology and the brain: it’s all in the features. By Itziar Laka.

Glass Brain

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Neuroscape Lab visualizes live brain functions using dramatic images | KurzweilAI.

GlassBrain. Credit: Neuroscape lab, UCSF

GlassBrain. Credit: Neuroscape lab, UCSF

“UC San Francisco neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, is hoping to paint a fuller picture of what is happening in the minds and bodies of those suffering from brain disease with his new lab, Neuroscape, which bridges the worlds of neuroscience and high-tech. Gazzaley aims to eliminate the need to immobilize subjects inside big, noisy machines or tether them to computers — making it impossible to simulate what it’s really like to live and interact in a complex world. Instead, in the Neuroscape lab, wireless and mobile technologies set research participants free to move around and interact inside 3D environments, while scientists make functional recordings with an array of technologies .”

Glass Brain flythrough

Representing compound words in the brain

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http://uncmain.sites.unc.edu/files/2012/06/ccm3_030355.jpg

Source: University of North Carolina

Teon Brooks, a member of the NYU Neurolinguistics Lab, looks at the computations involved in recognizing complex words, specifically compound words (words like swan boat, bird house, book award). For semanticists like me, work on compounds by neuroscientists is particularly interesting because compounds are arguably “semantic fossils” (Jackendoff 2002). The kind of compositionality we see in compounds is more rudimentary than the full-fledged compositionally that comes with phrasal syntax, where constituents are headed by functional elements related to voice, aktionsart, aspect, tense, mood, complementizers, definiteness, quantification, and what have you. I would therefore expect the meanings of compounds like swan boat to be computed in a qualitatively different way from the meanings of phrases like boat in the shape of a swan or boat that is inhabited by swans. Is this so? Is there any evidence for this?

Carl Zimmer on the brain in National Geographic

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A walk in the brain with Carl Zimmer

“Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time around brains. I’ve held slices of human brains preserved on glass slides. I’ve gazed through transparent mouse brains that look like marbles. I’ve spent a very uncomfortable hour having my own brain scanned … I’ve interviewed a woman about what it was like for her to be able to control a robot arm with an electrode implanted in her brain. I’ve talked to neuroscientists about the ideas they’ve used their own brains to generate to explain how the brain works.”

Interview with Jeff LIchtman

A way with words

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Karin Stromswold: A way with words

“Stromswold’s research on how prenatal and neonatal factors interact with genetic factors to influence linguistic and non-linguistic development suggests that the more formal aspects of language (syntax, morphology, and phonology) may have a stronger genetic component than, for example, vocabulary or discourse and pragmatics (the social aspects of language), each of which is more influenced by the postnatal environment.”

The cognitive neuroscience of language acquisition.

Douglas Bemis: Constructing complex ideas

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Douglas Bemis

“My current project is to develop a comprehensive model of how complex ideas are constructed from individual pieces within the brain. This model will be based upon fMRI, MEG, and EEG data (and hopefully extended to intracranial data as well!). The end product will be a computational description of the neural processes responsible for combining individual mental representations into coherent and unified structures. A key component of this investigation is the use of minimal combinatorial contexts, such as red boat, in order to isolate core combinatorial mechanisms.”

Jonathan Brennan: Computing meanings in the brain

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Computational Neurolinguistics Lab

“Our lab studies the mental structures and computations used to understand words and sentences, and how these processes are implemented in the brain. We use tools from formal linguistics, cognitive psychology, computational linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. We have an interest in methods that allow for the study of language under relatively natural circumstances, such as reading or listening to a story.

The apparent effortlessness of understanding speech owes to the finely tuned interactions between a wide range of complex cognitive systems, including those responsible for identifying what words are being said and what they mean, for fitting words into a sentence structure, and for determining the complex meanings and implications expressed by phrases and sentences. We approach the challenge of understanding these systems by combining computationally explicit models of each cognitive operation with data drawn from a wide range of neuroscience tools, including electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).”