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Asked by meghan to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 24 Mar 2010 in Categories: Theories.
Question: what is the latest project you have been working on?
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Joseph Devlin answered on 24 Mar 2010:
I don’t often get involved in very large projects because they can be a nightmare to coordinate but recently I was doing a fairly big one with colleagues in the UK, Spain and in Colombia. We were looking at how learning to read causes changes in brain structure.
Normally, people learn to read as kids and that makes it very hard to tell what effects this has because they are learning so many other things at the same time. And, of course, their brains are still growing to some extent too. So we studied adult members of the FARC guerilla army in Colombia because these healthy normal adults who grew up without any kind of schooling at all and were completely illiterate. But the Colombian government has set up a program that allows them to get training when they lay down their arms and rejoin normal society. So we used an MRI scanner to get pictures of their brains before and after learning to read (normally about 3 years apart) and looked for changes in the brain due to reading. What we found was exciting — areas involved in recognizing visual stimuli and other regions involved in processing sound both expanded after learning to read. This is pretty cool because obviously reading links visual symbols and their sounds. More importantly, we found increases in links between these ares.
The whole project took several years but it was worth it in the end. It was a unique opportunity to discover new information and it took many scientists working together to get it done.
For the truly keen, you can read the article at:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/nature08461.html
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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.
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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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