What Is the Sound of Thought?

Reading linguistic thought directly from the brain has brought us closer to answering an age-old question — and has opened the door to many more.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

What Is the Sound of Thought?

Reading linguistic thought directly from the brain has brought us closer to answering an age-old question — and has opened the door to many more.

more…

I was impressed recently by how many words I could find in (easy) crosswords. Which made me wonder how I learnt these words. Most of the words I don’t remember how I learnt them, and for more than a few I’m sure that I’ve never uttered them out loud. And yet, just a few trigger words in the clue brought them instantly to mind.

> electric waves preserve the shape of their corresponding sound waves in non-acoustic areas of the brain, such as in the Broca’s area, the part of the brain responsible for speech production.

> These findings shed important light on the relationship between sound waves and electric waves in the brain, but almost all of them rely on one aspect of the neuropsychological processes related to language: namely, sound emission decoding. Yet we know that language can also be present in the absence of sound, when we read.

> In 2014, we compared the shape of the electric waves characterizing the activity in the Broca’s area with the shape of the sound waves when they were reading linguistic expressions in absolute silence. The results were unexpected.

Very interesting.

> stimulating and analyzing the electrophysiological cortical activity of patients who have been awakened after a portion of their skullcap was removed. Once the patient has been anesthetized and a portion of the skullcap has been removed to access the surgical site, the surgeon wakes the patient and asks him or her to perform some simple tasks that should require their utilizing the exposed cortex. This technique has increasingly been used.

Um, what!

> we found that the shape of the electric waves recorded in a non-acoustic area of the brain when linguistic expressions are being read silently preserves the same structure as those of the mechanical sound waves of air. Can we exploit electro-cortical information to access the linguistic thinking of aphasic patients whose articulatory apparatus alone has been damaged, and hear them speak again, albeit through an artificial device? Can we get a better understanding of language used in dreaming or in patients who are in a minimally conscious state? Can we consider severe stuttering as a form of miscoordination between different sound representations in different networks and hope to intervene and cure it?