Sublime

In an fMRI brain-scan experiment,1 researchers at Princeton University found that neural resonance disappears when people communicate poorly. The researchers could predict how well people were communicating by observing how much their brains were aligned. And they discovered that people who paid the most attention—good listeners—could actually

What led early researchers to think that language might be localized is that disruption to particular regions of the brain reliably caused loss of language functions. Think of the circuits in your home again. If your contractor accidentally cuts an electrical wire, you can lose electricity in an entire section of your home, but it doesn’t mean that

Similarly, cognitive neuroscientists are increasingly appreciating that mental function is often spread out. Language ability does not reside in a specific region of the brain; rather, it comprises a distributed network—like the electrical wires in your house—that draws on and engages regions throughout the

While these observations certainly support the idea of plasticity in the neocortex, their more interesting implication is that we each appear to have two brains, not one, and we can do pretty well with either. If we lose one, we do lose the cortical patterns that are uniquely stored there, but each brain is in itself fairly complete. So does each

The traditional classroom consists of a teacher droning on, possibly reading from bulleted slides. This is suboptimal for brain changes, because the students are not engaged, and without engagement there is little to no plasticity. The information doesn’t stick.

Stephen Palmer, a professor of psychology at the University of California who directs the Visual Perception and Aesthetics Lab,

Cette observation réfute la croyance ancienne selon laquelle l’aire de Broca est une boîte à syntaxe autonome, indépendante de l’aire de Wernicke.

play a loud beep to someone, and use electrodes on the scalp (electroencephalography) to measure the brain’s response. In a normal adult, the beep elicits an electrical response that can be measured clearly over the auditory cortex, but is smaller or absent over the visual cortex. Now compare this with what you would see in a six-month-old child:

The key point is that all the neurons are passing information back and forth, from the top down and from the bottom up and from side to side. It’s a highly parallel system, and one that is quite different from our self-perception of the brain as a monolithic, centrally controlled system.