Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) have determined that the sound emanating from our lips leaves an acoustic trace that the brain is able to interpret . This has been the revealing conclusion of this study recently published in the journal Science .
Wernicke’s area of the brain is the area where the sounds of language are interpreted but, until now, it has not been specifically revealed how the brain interprets speech .
A specific region of the brain called superior temporal gyrus (SGT) is responsible for making a map of sounds and representing them; However, it was unknown how the individual neurons of the STG were able to extract different sounds from acoustic vibrations and make a representation of each and every one of them.
To do this, the UCSF team placed a series of neural recording devices directly on the surface of the brains of six patients who had undergone epilepsy surgery while they listened to a continuous speech in English.
The objective was to find where the neural responses were concentrated, taking into account that language is made up of consonants and vowels and that the brain has to extract and categorize these sounds to make sense of what is said.
The results of the study have revealed the specific origin of the acoustic-phonetic transformation process in the human STG. Thus, it is concluded that the brain has a systematic organization for basic sound function units, such as the elements of the periodic table .
These findings will help prevent, among other things, reading disorders.
