Colin came to us highly qualified in brain anatomy and physiology, wanting to talk to us as a tribute to one of his personal mentors who had recently passed away.
He gave a very engaging talk about the structure of language and it's development, and how the research into language was challenged. A particularly nice metaphor was that of the elephants trunk problem. The process of evolution of the trunk is not known because it is only soft tissue, so no fossils of the intermediate stages are found. Similarly, with (spoken) language, whilst we can easily look around the world and see the natives of different countries waving their trunks to communicate, and hypothesise that some of them look similar, we cannot truly know. This is exacerbated when we regress hundreds of thousands of years to the birth of spoken language.
The discussion of mirror neurones matched the research I had been reading about graded motor imagery and guided two-point discrimination retraining, along with adaptations of the rubber hand illusion used for chronic pain or phantom limb sufferers.
Sadly, I felt that through my previous readings in Chomsky and Pinker, I had already covered the basic challenges of language, and when I tried to engage in more detail, Dr. Stolkin avoided answering. Similarly, I felt that his knowledge of the current state of the art in fMRI and the concept of neurotags might have been somewhat out of date, but again he chose not to really answer my questions when I tried to draw parallels with current pain research. Ironically for a lecture on language, I felt reminded of the times in Japan when I had asked simple questions in Japanese to be told "No can speak English". Sometimes what the eye sees overrides what the ear hears, and I think that Colin was having that sort of confusion from my questions as an uninformed osteopath. Or perhaps I was just completely off-track and he wasn't interested!
Nevertheless, a nice revision of Wernicke and Broca's areas, and their use within the brain.
He gave a very engaging talk about the structure of language and it's development, and how the research into language was challenged. A particularly nice metaphor was that of the elephants trunk problem. The process of evolution of the trunk is not known because it is only soft tissue, so no fossils of the intermediate stages are found. Similarly, with (spoken) language, whilst we can easily look around the world and see the natives of different countries waving their trunks to communicate, and hypothesise that some of them look similar, we cannot truly know. This is exacerbated when we regress hundreds of thousands of years to the birth of spoken language.
The discussion of mirror neurones matched the research I had been reading about graded motor imagery and guided two-point discrimination retraining, along with adaptations of the rubber hand illusion used for chronic pain or phantom limb sufferers.
Sadly, I felt that through my previous readings in Chomsky and Pinker, I had already covered the basic challenges of language, and when I tried to engage in more detail, Dr. Stolkin avoided answering. Similarly, I felt that his knowledge of the current state of the art in fMRI and the concept of neurotags might have been somewhat out of date, but again he chose not to really answer my questions when I tried to draw parallels with current pain research. Ironically for a lecture on language, I felt reminded of the times in Japan when I had asked simple questions in Japanese to be told "No can speak English". Sometimes what the eye sees overrides what the ear hears, and I think that Colin was having that sort of confusion from my questions as an uninformed osteopath. Or perhaps I was just completely off-track and he wasn't interested!
Nevertheless, a nice revision of Wernicke and Broca's areas, and their use within the brain.