Conductor of speech uncovered in human brain

London, February 21 (ANI): Researchers have uncovered the neurological basis of speech motor control, the complex coordinated activity of tiny brain regions that controls our lips, jaw, tongue and larynx as we speak.


It also sheds light on an ability that is unique to humans among living creatures but poorly understood.

"Speaking is so fundamental to who we are as humans - nearly all of us learn to speak. But it's probably the most complex motor activity we do," said senior author Edward Chang, MD, a neurosurgeon at the UCSF Epilepsy Center and a faculty member in the UCSF Center for Integrative Neuroscience.

The complexity comes from the fact that spoken words require the coordinated efforts of numerous "articulators" in the vocal tract - the lips, tongue, jaw and larynx - but scientists have not understood how the movements of these distinct articulators are precisely coordinated in the brain.




"These properties may reflect cortical strategies to greatly simplify the complex coordination of articulators in fluent speech," said Kristofer Bouchard, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Chang lab who was the first author on the paper.

The research was described this week in the journal Nature. (ANI)