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The shape of the human language-ready brain
Our core hypothesis is that the emergence of our species-specific language-ready brain ought to be understood in light of the developmental changes expressed at the levels of brain morphology and neural connectivity that occurred in our species after the split from Neanderthals–Denisovans and that g...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2014
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3983487/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24772099 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00282 |
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author | Boeckx, Cedric Benítez-Burraco, Antonio |
author_facet | Boeckx, Cedric Benítez-Burraco, Antonio |
author_sort | Boeckx, Cedric |
collection | PubMed |
description | Our core hypothesis is that the emergence of our species-specific language-ready brain ought to be understood in light of the developmental changes expressed at the levels of brain morphology and neural connectivity that occurred in our species after the split from Neanderthals–Denisovans and that gave us a more globular braincase configuration. In addition to changes at the cortical level, we hypothesize that the anatomical shift that led to globularity also entailed significant changes at the subcortical level. We claim that the functional consequences of such changes must also be taken into account to gain a fuller understanding of our linguistic capacity. Here we focus on the thalamus, which we argue is central to language and human cognition, as it modulates fronto-parietal activity. With this new neurobiological perspective in place, we examine its possible molecular basis. We construct a candidate gene set whose members are involved in the development and connectivity of the thalamus, in the evolution of the human head, and are known to give rise to language-associated cognitive disorders. We submit that the new gene candidate set opens up new windows into our understanding of the genetic basis of our linguistic capacity. Thus, our hypothesis aims at generating new testing grounds concerning core aspects of language ontogeny and phylogeny. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3983487 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2014 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-39834872014-04-25 The shape of the human language-ready brain Boeckx, Cedric Benítez-Burraco, Antonio Front Psychol Psychology Our core hypothesis is that the emergence of our species-specific language-ready brain ought to be understood in light of the developmental changes expressed at the levels of brain morphology and neural connectivity that occurred in our species after the split from Neanderthals–Denisovans and that gave us a more globular braincase configuration. In addition to changes at the cortical level, we hypothesize that the anatomical shift that led to globularity also entailed significant changes at the subcortical level. We claim that the functional consequences of such changes must also be taken into account to gain a fuller understanding of our linguistic capacity. Here we focus on the thalamus, which we argue is central to language and human cognition, as it modulates fronto-parietal activity. With this new neurobiological perspective in place, we examine its possible molecular basis. We construct a candidate gene set whose members are involved in the development and connectivity of the thalamus, in the evolution of the human head, and are known to give rise to language-associated cognitive disorders. We submit that the new gene candidate set opens up new windows into our understanding of the genetic basis of our linguistic capacity. Thus, our hypothesis aims at generating new testing grounds concerning core aspects of language ontogeny and phylogeny. Frontiers Media S.A. 2014-04-04 /pmc/articles/PMC3983487/ /pubmed/24772099 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00282 Text en Copyright © 2014 Boeckx and Benítez-Burraco. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Boeckx, Cedric Benítez-Burraco, Antonio The shape of the human language-ready brain |
title | The shape of the human language-ready brain |
title_full | The shape of the human language-ready brain |
title_fullStr | The shape of the human language-ready brain |
title_full_unstemmed | The shape of the human language-ready brain |
title_short | The shape of the human language-ready brain |
title_sort | shape of the human language-ready brain |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3983487/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24772099 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00282 |
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