Can You Use Language When You're Doing Math?

Your brain is where language - and all of your other thinking - happens. In order to figure out how language fits in among all of the other things you do with your brain, we can put people in fancy brain scanning machines and then create very controlled setups where exactly one thing is different. For example, comparing looking at words versus nonwords (of the same length, on the same background) or listening to audio clips of a language you do speak vs a language you don’t speak. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch talks with Dr Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, USA about figuring out which parts of the brain do language things! We talk about how we can use brain scans to compare language with other things your brain can do, such as solving visual puzzles, math problems, music, and inferring things about other people’s mental states, as well as comparing how the brains of multilingual people process their various languages. We also talk about the results of the fMRI language experiments that Gretchen got to be a participant in: which side is doing most of her language processing and how active her brain is for French compared to English. For links to things mentioned in this episode, including an image of Gretchen's brain: