Transcript

Something really weird and fascinating is happening right now as you watch and listen to this video, sounds are streaming into your ears, or maybe, if you're watching this while it's muted and you're looking at the closed captions, you're seeing or hearing symbols, some kind of stimuli that's coming into your brain and somehow triggering very specific thoughts and ideas and connections and memories in your brain, and that is what we broadly refer to as language, right? And right now I'm using language to convey those thoughts into your mind, directly into your brain, and that seems really normal, right? But just think about how strange it is that you're sitting here spending maybe an hour, yes, the whole hour, watch the whole episode,listening to us make sounds and gestures like I'm doing with my hands right now to convey information to you. We just rarely do. We ever stop and think about how odd that is, and how does that even work in the brain? So today we're going to be talking about the neuroscience of language, and it is just fascinating field.

So I'm excited to jump into it. Let's get to it. Welcome to the social brain. I'm Andrew, but I'm Taylor, and this is a show where we dive into how the brain works. If you've ever wondered what's going on inside your mind, even the things that you're not even aware of, then this is the place where we can unpack that and really explore it. So,you know, in my history and like researching neuroscience and all of these things, I've actually been somewhat averse to, like, even looking at the research of language. And I think a lot of that personally came from my disdain for English class. Like I hated English so much, just like the grammar and the syntax, and, like, learning all of these, like fancy words, like I know how to talk, right, um, but I think as I've, as I've gotten further in my career, and really, like, come to appreciate just how incredible the brain is.