Human beings have a lot in common with other species.
We all reproduce and take care of our offspring.
So a lot of the things that any species does
during any given day is going to be similar.
We're all trying to get food and shelter and so forth.
Human beings communicate like other animals do,
but we communicate in very different ways than other animals do.
The thing that most distinguishes us from other animals
is the sophistication of our language and what that allows us to do culturally.
In Spanish, there are different ways of saying the word "love":
"te quiero" or "te amo."
There's a word called, "men nao,"
which is like a sour, rotting smell.
If I'm eating a pasta dish or something else,
I may make a comment in Italian, because you can feel the flavor of it
in that particular language.
There are lots of species that have some kind of communication system.
But there's no species that can talk about the future...
"One small step for man"
talk about abstractions,
use language as a sort of way of transmitting cultural information.
Talking about technology.
Talking about the details of what people's plans are for the future.
"I have a dream"
Language is partly in the vocal cords, if you have a spoken language,
or partly in the hands.
But mostly it's in the brain.
The thing that allows us to learn language is this complicated
interconnected network of a whole bunch of different regions of the brain.
Language demands that most of the brain get involved.
The imaging center at Columbia University
is a research center
that is aimed toward understanding the basic neurocircuitry of how the brain works.
We are able to image the human brain while it's working
and see the parts that are engaged in specific processes.
Language is one of the functions that is uniquely human,
and so understanding the neurocircuitry that underlies language
is extremely important.
O.K., Glenn.
I want you to slide down a little bit.
The first step in understanding
how the brain is orgainized and how it works,
is to develop a task that people can do in the scanner
that allows us to illuminate those parts of the brain that are actually engaged.
So, Glenn, how are you doing?
I'm O.K. Are you all comfy?
Yeah, good. O.K., great.
O.K., here we go.
I want to actually lock on to an area...
So as these small areas of the brain become active,
they actually recruit blood.
Just walk right in there.
And it's the oxygen in the blood that modifies our signal.
Yeah, excellent. Excellent.
Look at that.
With the baseline, activity, baseline, activity, baseline, activity.
Beautiful.
The study of language requires many different tests of language.
I mean, language is a very complicated function.
As I'm sitting here talking to you,
my brain is engaged in a multiplicity of processes.
The first is that I'm conceptualizing what I want to say to you.
I have that orgainized in some fashion in my brain.
I listen to myself talk.
I modulate what I'm about to say based on what I have just said.
And if one could put me in the scanner and image this system,
you would see a complex array of actions and reactions in my brain,
just to communicate the thoughts to you that I am.
So, Glenn, what we're going to do is a simple picure-naming task.
Your job is, when you see the pictures, to name what you see in your head.
Here we go.
And so there's no such thing as one image of the language system.
There is an image of the language system doing object naming.
Cactus.
Pretzel.
I don't know what you're called, but some people use them to count.
What is that thing called?
In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan...
There is an image of the language system doing passive listening.
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless...
There is an image of the language system
working on problems and high-level decision making,
And so the language system can be revealed through an orderly
sequence of specific tasks that we use to probe it.
Did you have any trouble with any of the tasks?
Not at all.
Our tests suggest that the language system incorporates a toolbox, if you will.
An array of tools.
Each of these tools performs a specific part of the language function.
But if you activate one part of the complex whole,
it appears that there's a readiness to activate the entire language network.
I speak English and a little Thai.
English, Bengali, and Spanish.
English and Russian.
Of course, we're very interested in
what makes the language system of the human unique.
And, so, there are numbers of hypothesis that we and others are exploring.
One of the hypothesis is that the human brain
is more interconnected than nonhuman primates, for example.
So although the brains look very similar,
the parts of the brain may not be connected in quite the same way.
Humans are sort of like "Chimpanzee 2.0" or something like that.
Humans are adaptations from something like chimpanzees.
And our brains are built on some fairly complicated machinery that's already there.
So language actually draws on a lot of mechanisms
that were shaped over a long period of time,
and then kind of builds on top of them.
"Ask not what you country can do for you"
So, it's sort of like icing on a cake That was in the oven for a long time.
But the icing is really important.