The language centres of the brain, known as Broca's area and Wernicke's area, after the 19th-century researchers who discovered them, are part of the cerebral cortex on the left-hand side of the organ.
This shift in language prompts the brain to focus on solutions rather than obstacles.
All of the brain regions involved in processing language fired up as if the brain were healthy and normal.
It taps into emotional brain centres and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain.
More recent work has shown that the formation of microgyria throws the pattern of neural connections between the language centres and the rest of the brain into confusion.
They found that they got the effect whichever visual field they presented the test to, but it was stronger when the presentation was to the right one (ie, to the left-hand, language-processing side of the brain), than to the left one.
The trouble is that language is so powerful that the left brain easily starts dominating, but really almost all of our critical inputs come from non-verbal signals.
Professor GERALDINE DAWSON (Director, Autism Center, University of Washington): When we think about the brain systems that are involved in autism that are responsible for things like eye contact or interest in other people or the development of language, these are brain systems that come on in the first year of life, certainly by six to seven months of age.
Mary Lou Jepsen of Google believes we can better understand brain disease, and brain functions like language learning, if we can massively increase the resolution of brain scans.
For example, scientists can place a sensor over the Brocca's area, a part of the brain essential for language.
Osofsky-McGonigle had aphasia, a common outcome of stroke in which parts of the brain related to language, including reading, writing and talking, are damaged.
The authors say cultural evolution, not the brain, drives language development.
Dr Studdert-Kennedy maintains that speech moves in a fluid stream of sound that has little resemblance to the discrete tones used in Dr Merzenich's hearing tests, and that dyslexia probably stems from a high-level problem in the brain's language system that is simply not yet understood.
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And it turns out that some of the regions where monkeys have mirror neurons correspond to areas of the human brain that handle language.
The mechanism behind this bias appears to be located in a specific part of the brain, the left inferior frontal gyrus, which is involved in language, among other functions.
That's because the right side of the brain can take over some language functions.
For around 90 minutes each day, the electrodes were also stimulated to map the structure of the brain so as to identify language centres and other vulnerable areas.
The biggest differences in myelination occurred in the temporo-parietal region in the brain's left hemisphere the area that seems to control most language processing.
The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.
They already have experience with language, and their brain can sometimes fill in the gap with words they don't always hear.
Samuels, director of neuroscience critical care at Emory University in Atlanta, said portions of the left brain control speech and understanding language.
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But the reality is that many parts of the brain work together to produce speech and no single gene, region of the brain or theory can explain successful language-learning.
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For instance, an injury to the left hemisphere of the brain, which in 95% of people controls the capacity to understand and generate language, doesn't necessarily mean the patient can never have a conversation again.
Tracy Mobley can have good days, when she shows no symptoms of frontotemporal dementia, which affects the areas of the brain associated with personality, behavior and language.
At the same time, social and intellectual activities such as visiting family and friends, reading, playing intellectually stimulating games or learning a new language did nearly nothing to ward off the symptoms of an aging brain, the study said.
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This suggests that the brain may treat musical notation as a form of language.
Hawkins, who will continue to work as chief technical officer of Treo maker palmOne (nasdaq: PLMO - news - people ), already has his own research lab to study the neocortex, a massive part of the brain thought to hold such higher level functions as language, learning, memory and complex thought.
The discovery of the FOXP2 brain gene, a mutation of which can cause language loss, was met with considerable excitement when it was announced over a decade ago.
ECONOMIST: What makes some people learn language after language?
If you treat it like a language, as Wooten suggests, you might learn new skills and reap some of the brain health benefits that neurologists are exploring.
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