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What Other Mental Functions get Their Own Private Patch of Real Estate in the Brain?| title | What Other Mental Functions get Their Own Private Patch of Real Estate in the Brain? |
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| start_date | 2023/12/08 |
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| schedule | 10h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Salle des Actes |
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| summary | Having established that at least one region of the cortex is highly specialized for a particular mental function, we set off in search of others. Over the next few years we identified the extrastriate body area (EBA), which responds very selectively to images of bodies and body parts, and the parahippocampal place area (PPA), which responds selectively to images of places. Newer data-driven methods enabled us to identify two surprising new functional selectivities in the cortex : for music in auditory cortex, and for visually presented food in high-level visual cortex. Other lines of work have identified cortical regions implicated in yet higher-level perceptual functions, including one selectively responsive during the perception of third-party social interactions (containing information about whether those interactions were competitive or cooperative), and another broadly implicated in intuitive physical reasoning. But what about abstract, uniquely human cognitive functions ? Rebecca Saxe showed that a region in the right temporo-parietal junction was extremely selectively engaged in "theory of mind", or thinking about what other people are thinking, a mental function already shown to have a distinctive developmental trajectory and a selective deficit in autism, and now apparently a private patch of brain as well. Evelina Fedorenko then turned to the long-standing and contentious question of the specificity of brain regions for language. Using the individual-subject functional ROI approach, Fedorenko showed that in fact the brain regions for language are remarkably specifically engaged in language per se, with almost no response during these other high-level mental processes, from arithmetic to music to working memory and cognitive control. Thus, language and thought are not the same thing in the brain. The work described in this lecture fills out the picture of the human brain as containing a large number of regions that are highly specialized for particular mental functions, providing us with an initial rough sketch of the human mind. |
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| responsibles | de Vignemont |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2023/09/26 14:00 UTC |
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