neural networks

Perhaps we should start thinking of language less as some specialized process and more as one approach to thought. A study involving native signers of American Sign Language (which has the helpful characteristic that subject-object relationships can be expressed in either of the two ways languages usually use: word order or inflection) has revealed that there are distinct regions of the brain that are used to process the two types of sentences: those in which word order determined the relationships between the sentence elements, and those in which inflection was providing the information.

Visual working memory, which can only hold three of four objects at a time, is thought to be based on synchronized brain activity across a network of brain regions. Now a new study has allowed us to get a better picture of how exactly that works. Both the maintenance and the contents of working memory were connected to brief synchronizations of neural activity in alpha, beta and gamma brainwaves across frontoparietal regions that underlie executive and attentional functions and visual areas in the occipital lobe.