Question: Hi! Have you done any experiments to find out what percentage of animals brains are used in communication compared with humans? Thanks :)

Joseph Devlin answered on 16 Mar 2010:

This isn’t an easy question to answer because it is very difficult to quantify how much of one’s brain is used for language. In my profile, I have a picture under “Me and my work” showing that huge areas of the human brain participate in language (all the colored areas). And that’s relatively easy to figure out because we have brain scanners and we can ask people to help out with those experiments.

It’s much more difficult to decide how much of an animal’s brain is being used for communication because how do yo convince an animal to communicate while in a scanner? Instead we know that certain areas are important for animal communication from lesion studies. That is, if one damages specific parts of the monkey brain, for instance, you can stop it from making calls or from responding to calls from other monkeys. In general, these areas map on to similar areas in humans but this is pretty crude.

There’s little doubt that more areas of human brain are involved in language than in other species (most animals make poor readers, for instance, so don’t need visual brain areas for thir communication).