Photo of the Day - Mother Nature is Incredible!

Taking a Peak

National Geographic description:
As beams of light from the setting sun burst through clouds, a triumphant hiker basks in their glow on a summit in Hawaii’s Ko’olau Range. The achievement, according to Liz Barney, who submitted this photo, was the culmination of rigorous preparation and effort. “It’s not a well-known trek … but for two women, it was their dream,” she says. “[The women] spent an entire year planning and training to cross the Ko’olau summit ridgeline in one self-sufficient thru-hike ... They failed multiple times before they finally succeeded.”

Image credit: Liz Barney via National Geographic Photo of the Day

Head to Liz Barney's blog for more incredible imagery

This photograph was submitted to the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest

Original source: http://www.lizbarney.com/outdoors/summitpt1/

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