Language, Brain and Behavior

I'm sitting in a class on Brain and Behavior at my college between two of my own courses I teach on MWF. It's tiring but fascinating. As a doctoral student in 2005, I took a course in Perception and Sensation that covered a lot of brain functions relating to speech and language, but a lot has been discovered since then due to various imaging technologies used to study the brain. So I'm basically catching up.

While my wonderful colleague, a neuroscientist who teaches the course, goes over various parts of the Forebrain and the Cerebral Cortex, I pay particular attention to the areas that constitute what is known as the Language Loop - parts of the brain responsible for recognition, comprehension and production of speech.

"In the temporal lobe," he explains, "the Wernicke's Area is responsible for understanding of the spoken language, the information signals transferred from Auditory Cortex after they are processed by the Thalamus connected to the ears."

All of that I already knew but it is nice to go over this again. "And when you respond to someone else's speech," he continues, "the Broca's Area activates for production of speech and sends the signals to the Motor Cortex that generates voluntary muscle movements when you speak."

At this point, a random thought enters my mind: Do all those areas of the brain themselves know how important they are and what functions they perform? For example, when Neil mentions how important the Broca's Area is, do cells in that area go like, "Yay, he mentioned us, he's talking about us, let's fire up double, show him some beautiful fireworks?"

I know it's silly but I find it endlessly fascinating. Especially because we still have so much to learn about how our brain works. Like right now, I am imagining a huge party in my Occipital Lobe, home of the Visual Cortex that is responsible for perceiving and making sense of the text I'm writing, firing up and down to the Motor Cortex that commands me to type. Those partying cells need a lot of dopamine and that's probably why I'm craving chocolate right now. Isn't it all amusing?

P.S. Here's a good video on the Language Loop, from which I lifted the cover pic for this story:

One more good resource on Language and Brain is here: