What happens in our brain when we speak? Although verbal expression is made up of a whole series of very complex mechanisms, an international team of scientists has managed to identify the way in which vowels are encoded in our brain. The finding could be used to develop systems that allowregain speech to people who have lost it, or to facilitate communication in patients with some type of paralysis.
The researchers, from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Israel Institute of Technology, placed several electrodes in the brains of epileptic patients, in order to look for possible curative surgeries. In turn, they took the opportunity to analyze their brain function while they performed a series of tasks. One of them consisted of articulating vowels, which allowed the scientists to record the activity of individual neurons that went to ‘work’ to carry out the task. In this way they couldidentify cells and groups of cells that were activated based on the articulated vowel. “Brain cells specialize and respond differently, so vowels are represented with different activity by different neurons,” explained Itzhak Fried, one of the authors, to the BBC.
This discovery has important implications. For example, in a person who has lost their speech, it may be useful to record their brain activity as they try to communicate in order to translate the activity of their neurons into words. Although there is still much to do until these technologies are a reality, work is already underway on systems such as theneuroprótesis, some devices that move based on the neural code. At the moment these tests have been carried out for motor activities, which allow patients tomanipulate objects, but in the future these systems could restore speech to people who have lost it. “They would be interfaces between the brain and machines to decode the patterns of neural activity and allow someone to communicate,” said Fried.
