Stanislas Dehaene holds the chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collège de France, and he is also the director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at NeuroSpin, France’s most advanced neuroimaging research center. He is best known for his research into the brain basis of numbers, popularized in his book, “The Number Sense.” In his new book, “Reading in the Brain,” he describes his quest to understand an astounding feat that most of us take for granted: translating marks on a page (or a screen) into language. He answered questions recently from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. [More]

My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable, and that by extension people who own different words live in different conceptual worlds -- called "Whorfianism" after its academic evangelist, Benjamin Lee Whorf -- is so pervasive in modern thought as to be unremarkable. [More]

A great deal of scientific research is driven by a very fundamental question: What makes us human? And what are the properties of the human brain that make these talents possible? One challenge facing scientists is that answering these questions often requires the use of nonhuman animals as subjects. In fact, animal models have even proved essential when it comes to studying uniquely human talents, such as language.

In 2001 Cecilia S. L. Lai and colleagues at the University of Oxford identified FOXP2 as the first gene specifically involved in speech and language development in humans. The gene was discovered when researchers began studying members of a family that exhibited severe language deficits: they struggled to speak in grammatically correct sentences and often failed to comprehend the language of others, although they demonstrated no other cognitive handicaps. A genetic analysis of the family linked these severe linguistic deficits to a mutation in the FOXP2 gene. Interestingly, the FOXP2 gene is highly conserved among vertebrates, including humans, songbirds, bats and rodents, perhaps indicating a shared function. Experimental evidence from a variety of animals suggests a general role in communication for FOXP2 . For instance, mice that lack the gene produce abnormal ultrasonic vocalizations, while the expression of the gene changes in the brains of songbirds during vocal learning.