Question corner | How does our brain process sounds and words?

 Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have discovered a new pathway in the human brain that processes the sounds of language. They found that auditory and speech processing occu

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have discovered a new pathway in the human brain that processes the sounds of language. They found that auditory and speech processing occur in parallel (Cell). For decades, scientists have thought that speech processing in the auditory cortex followed a serial pathway. It was thought that first, the primary auditory cortex processes simple acoustic information, such as frequencies of sounds. Then, an adjacent region, the superior temporal gyrus (STG), extracts more important features, like consonants and vowels, transforming sounds into meaningful words. But direct evidence for thishas been lacking. Nine participants who underwent brain surgeries had arrays of small electrodes to cover their entire auditory cortex to collect neural signals for language and seizure mapping. The recordings were analysed to understand how the auditory cortex processes speech sounds.