Understanding accents

Lateral surface of the brain with Brodmann's areas numbered.

One thing I cannot do without is cinema. There is something about the big screen that arouses my imagination and helps me forget all my worries. Yesterday I watched Macbeth and it was a great movie. There is something that kept me from enjoying it even more though. The heavy Scottish accent by some of the actors (in combination with the Shakespearean language), was too hard for me to completely follow.

I have been studying and speaking English for almost 20 years. So what is it that helps us understand a word spoken with a different way?

The culprit in this case would be Wernicke's area, situated between the auditory and visual cortex of the brain. Until recently it was believed that only the part of Wernicke's area in the dominant hemisphere (the left hemisphere in 97% of people) was responsible for speech comprehension. There is increasingly more research evidence surfacing though, to support a role of the less-dominant hemisphere, participating in the comprehension of ambiguous words.

There is some research going on about training accent recognition in people, with specially designed dictionaries (Kat and Fung, 1999), but there isn't really much that can be done, as the underlying knowledge about the mechanisms directly involved in this process, is very little.

Now the next step is not finding what helps us understand language (thank God fMRI helped us a lot on this regard), but what keeps a healthy individual from recognizing spoken words.

It is funny how we can train computers and robots to understand our language and even our accent (siris cortana etc), but we don't even know what is going on in our brains, so we can do the same.

References:
Harpaz Y, Levkovitz Y, Lavidor M. (2009). Lexical ambiguity resolution in Wernicke's area and its right homologue. Cortex, Vol 45 (9), 1097–1103. DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2009.01.002

Kat L W, Fung P. (1999). "Fast accent identification and accented speech recognition". Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Proceedings. 1999 IEEE International Conference on , Vol.1, 221-224. DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP.1999.758102

Image credit: Henry Vandyke Carter, Henry Gray. (1918). Lateral surface of left cerebral hemisphere, viewed from the side. Anatomy of the Human Body, Fig. 726. Anatomy of the Human Body

Photo of the Day: Engineering a Mini-Brain!

"A bioengineering team at Brown University can grow “mini-brains” of neurons and supporting cells that form networks and are electrically active."

A bundle of neurons

Image credit: Hoffman-Kim lab/Brown University

Original source: An accessible approach to making a mini-brain

Gaming addiction. Does it really happen?

Gaming addiction is a phenomenon that has a rising trend as we move forward to the future. What is that makes us game addicts though?

Civilization V - Game-play screenshot

Be honest here. Of those of you that play or played games, in some point in your life, did you not participate in the following situation? Your mom or dad calls you for dinner. You are in the middle of an "important" decision in a game and you scream back "I 'll be there in a minute". Then the one minute becomes five and the five ten. Finally you join them in the middle of dinner as if you were dealing with a life altering decision back there.

Of course some of you will say I don't get controlled by games, I don't play them. The difference is that you are not playing games. If you don't use something how will you be addicted to it. In the place of "games" you can put something else in there, like a TV program, reading, smoking a cigarette, work papers etc. A task you are doing that in the process causes you to be unsociable.

How does gaming addiction relates to science though? Apparently many studies have been conducted around this issue. An early research by Ko, Chih-Hung et al in 2009, showed that gaming addiction and substance addiction may share the same neurobiological mechanism.

Surgical restoration of hand and arm movements for quadriplegics!

A few years ago while I was talking with a close friend, I brought up the subject of full body regeneration as a joke (that was me watching too much anime that time) and we debated whether that was possible to happen in the future, that being a hundred years or a million years from now.

Although this is not the case I am reporting here, the breakthrough technique that has been developed by scientists of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, showed me that when it comes to science and innovation, dreams are not unachievable.

Slight restoration of hand and arm movement for quadriplegics, is a small step towards the big goal that is, full body movement restoration for people with spinal cord injuries.

The biggest gain though is not what is does for science, but the  betterment of quality of life of the people suffering with spinal cord injuries.