• Question: What are you working on at the moment?

    Asked by alexxgrace to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 24 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 24 Mar 2010:

      We have a few projects going on in my lab at the moment:

      1. Tae, one of my PhD students, is leading one that looks at what’s going on when people read words and whether this is different when they read words in English vs. Japanese. This is an interesting thing to look at because English is alphabetic whereas Japanese uses a combination of an alphabet (Hiragana) and logographs (Kanji) so Japanese adults have experience with both systems. We’re using MRI to investigate whether there is a single system involved in reading across cultures or whether parts of the brain are specialized in different ways depending on your reading experience.

      2. Keith, my other PhD student, is completing a project looking at how a particular brain region — called the ventral occipito-temporal cortex — contributes to reading. He is using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily scramble processing in this region and see how it affects people’s ability to read. He’s already discovered several important things about the information processing that occurs there that are forcing us to change our ideas about how reading works in the brain.

      3. Two postgrad students are running yet another project using TMS looking at how a different area of the brain contributes to processing the sounds of words. This is just getting going.

      Those are the three main projects currently running although we have another 5-6 where we’ve collected the data and are processing it and writing up the results.

      Part of the fun in the job is always having multiple projects on the go!

    • Photo: Nick Bradshaw

      Nick Bradshaw answered on 24 Mar 2010:

      I have been trying to figure out how three proteins, each of which can cause shcizophrenia, work together in the cell. They seem to work togther to help nerve cells grow – so it is possible that when they go wrong it causes nerved in the brain to become “mis-wired” and that this may be part of the cause of schziophrenia, at least in some people.

    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 24 Mar 2010:

      At the moment I’m writing up a couple of research papers on projects I ran last year. The first is a study looking at how people understand speech from sound + video. I scanned people in MRI while they watched videos of a woman saying sentences. Sounds easy, but I blurred the videos and distorted the speech sounds (wa ha haaa!) so people had to try that bit harder. I also varied how much blurring and disortion I used, so some sentences were easier than others. In my analyses, I identified the brain regions that people use to put together the audio and visual information when they’re trying to understand the sentences. I also found bits of the brain that were activated more in the people who could understand the sentences better than the people who were a bit worse at the task.

      The second paper I’m writing is about vocal impersonations (like you see on TV shows like Dead Ringers or Fonejacker). We scanned ordinary people while they tried to do spoken impersonations of familiar people (famous people, family members, friends) and impersonations of accents (e.g. USA, Northern Irish, Yorkshire). I identified a set of brain regions that are more active during impersonations than during ordinary speech – these were in bits of the brain that plan speech output and control the movements of our mouths for speech, and also in bits of the brain used for listening to speech. We hope to write up another study soon where we do the same thing with professional voice artists, including hopefully some of the people you have seen on TV! Watch this space…

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