Seeking Speech

We often hear the phrase “I said it without thinking!” but in fact, the act of speaking is an incredibly complex process involving many regions of the brain. Scientists are using a technique called functional MRI scanning – which 'lights up' bits of the brain when they're active – to understand more about how all these parts work together to produce language. These images are simplified representations of the connections between particular parts of the brain, each highlighted in a different colour, revealed by scanning volunteers as they carry out a range of tasks: resting (middle), speaking single syllables or whole sentences (top right and bottom right, respectively), or doing non-speech tasks – finger-tapping (top left) or listening to musical notes (bottom left). The results show that while the simpler tasks use three main regions within the brain, the act of speaking needs six different parts to work together.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image adapted from work by Stefan Fuertinger and colleagues
• Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, USA
• Originally published under a Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication
• Published in PLOS Biology, July 2015