Patients who were to undergo brain surgery to treat seizures had electrodes inserted in their brains to help the surgeons. But some scientists collected data from those electrodes and found that it is possible to detect when three major aspects of language processing can be detected starting sequentially.
A study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine reports a significant breakthrough in explaining gaps in scientists' understanding of human brain function. The study – which provides a picture of language processing in the brain with unprecedented clarity – will be published in the October 16 issue of the journal Science.
"Two central mysteries of human brain function are addressed in this study: one, the way in which higher cognitive processes such as language are implemented in the brain and, two, the nature of what is perhaps the best-known region of the cerebral cortex, called Broca's area," said first author Ned T. Sahin, PhD, post-doctoral fellow in the UCSD Department of Radiology and Harvard University Department of Psychology.
The study demonstrates that a small piece of the brain can compute three different things at different times – within a quarter of a second – and shows that Broca's area doesn't just do one thing when processing language. The discoveries came through the researchers' use of a rare procedure in which electrodes were placed in the brains of patients. The technique allowed surgeons to know which small region of the brain to remove to alleviate their seizures, while sparing the healthy regions necessary for language. Recordings for research purposes were then made while the patients were awake and responsive. The procedure, called Intra-Cranial Electrophysiology (ICE), allowed the researchers to resolve brain activity related to language with spatial accuracy down to the millimeter and temporal accuracy down to the millisecond.
I wonder why the temporal accuracy of these probes is only 1 millisecond. Oscilloscopes and logic analyzers can measure finer granularity than that. Anyone have any idea why the 1 millisecond temporal measurement accuracy?
So what would it take to optimize the brain to start lexical, grammatical and articulatory computations sooner than 200, 320, and 450 millseconds after a word is presented?
"We showed that distinct linguistic processes are computed within small regions of Broca's area, separated in time and partially overlapping in space," said Sahin. Specifically, the researchers found patterns of neuronal activity indicating lexical, grammatical and articulatory computations at roughly 200, 320 and 450 milliseconds after the target word was presented. These patterns were identical across nouns and verbs and consistent across patients.
Do any humans do the processing sooner than these numbers? Perhaps high IQ people are quicker?
By Randall Parker at 2009 October 15 11:30 PM Brain SurveillanceAs someone with a genuis level IQ - I have always felt that I process language quicker than many of my peers - including my wife who, while untested, has an IQ very close to my own.
Some specific examples of this are my ability to immediately take back up a conversation which was interupted earlier in the day, my inability to watch or listen to movie previews without ruining essential plot elements of the movie for me, my ability to quickly interpret the contextual meaning of incompletely formed responses from children (including my own).
While certainly my lifelong love of reading has helped sharpen my language skills - (if not my spelling skills) - my wife is actually the more voracious reader in the family - by a longshot.
I have always attributed these abilities to what certainly feels like a faster processing of information in the brain - both specific details - and abstractions based on them.
I have only an above average memory, however, unlike one of my fellow Mensans who has a near perfect photographic memory of textbooks. I have found that although I am only slightly higher in IQ then him I do process language still a bit faster.
So I would conclude, on personal experience, that an unusually high ability to take in detail does not necessarily contribute to faster processing of that detail. Neither does it esspecially seem to hamper those who have high IQ's despite the inferred information overload.
Based on my experiences with achieveing ketosis - I wonder if greater amounts of glucose is required to maintain this faster processing - as I definately experienced a noticable drop in IQ when maintaining a near carbohydrate free diet.
(of course I only realized it when I finally re-introduced carbohydrates and simple sugars back into my diet)
It simplky makes no sense to have higher resolution, given relatively low neuron firing frequencies and signal propagation speed in axons.
thats what I was going to say averros but you beat me to it.
You never post anything about fringe science. I understand this is a more technically oriented blog which shuns the 'woo' but maybe after 10 or 15 years of searching you will find something surprising. I've read this blog off/on for many years and I think a change of content (a little) would be an improvement.
what is fringe? about half of the energy articles posted at nextbigfuture
matthew,
I like what Brian Wang posts. He does a great job. But is it fringe? How so? Can you point to an example of a fringe article by him?
I linked to a bunch of articles he did on nuclear power and nuclear-powered ships. I do not see those posts as fringe.
Fringe science? You mean stuff that most scientists think is dubious? Or stuff about the very leading edge? Or what?
Randall,
I sincerely thank you for posting cutting edge science while astutely avoiding those new "discoveries" that are indeed viewed as highly dubious and non-reproducible...
If there's one thing that drives me crazy about the internet - is the time tested maxim - that there's a sucker born every minute - and that there seems to be a new con man born every second!
Please keep up the Great Work!!