Washington, August 31 (ANI): A finding from MIT has marked a major advance in the search for brain regions specialized for sophisticated mental functions.
By using an innovative technique Evelina Fedorenko, a research scientist in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and first author of the new study and her co-authors, yielded evidence that there are, in fact, bits of the brain that do language and nothing else.
By way of analogy, Fedorenko said, imagine taking pictures of 10 people's faces and overlaying them, one on top of another, to achieve some sort of average face. While the resulting image would certainly look like a face, when you compared it back to the original pictures, it would not line up perfectly with any of them. That's because there is natural variation in our features - the size of our foreheads, the width of our noses, the distance between our eyes.
It's the same way for brains, Fedorenko said.
"Brains are different in their folding patterns, and where exactly the different functional areas fall relative to these patterns," said Fedorenko.
"The general layout is similar, but there isn't fine-grained matching," added Fedorenko.
After all the experiments, out of the nine regions they analyzed - four in the left frontal lobe, including the region known as Broca's area, and five further back in the left hemisphere - eight uniquely supported language, showing no significant activation for any of the seven other tasks.
These findings indicated a "striking degree of functional specificity for language,"
The study has been detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)
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