“I think that the brain pathways that control speech evolved out of the brain pathways that control body movement. Alright. And, that's, when you talk about Italian, French, English, and so forth, each one of those languages come with a learned set of gestures that you can communicate with.”
“Most vertebrate species vocalize, but most of them are producing innate sounds that they're born with, that is babies crying, for example, or dogs barking. And only a few species have learned vocal communication, the ability to imitate sounds. And that is what makes spoken language special. When people think of what's special about language, it's the learned vocalizations. That is what's rare.”
“And when we look at the genetic data from these ancestral hominids that, you know, where we can look at genes that are involved in learned vocal communication, they have the same sequence as we humans do for genes that function in speech circuits. So I think Neanderthals had spoken language. I'm not gonna say it's as advanced as what it is in humans. I don't know. But I think it's been there for at least between five hundred thousand to a million years.”
“There's some species of hummingbirds, that actually will, Doug Ashler showed this, that will flap, their wings and create a slapping sound with their wings that's in unison with their song. And, oh, and you would not know it, but it sounds like a particular syllable in their songs, even though it's their wings and their voice at the same time.”
“So if you bring people from two separate populations together that have been in their separate populations evolutionarily, at least, for hundreds of generations. So someone's speaking Chinese, someone's speaking English, and that child, then's learning from both of them. Yes. That child's gonna be able to pick up and merge, phonemes and words together in a way that an adult wouldn't. Because why they're experiencing both languages at the same time during their critical period, years in a way that, adults would not be able to experience. And so you get a hybrid.”
“All vocal learning species use their learned sounds for this emotional, effective kind of communication. But only a few of them, like humans and some parrots and dolphins, use it for the semantic kind of communication we're calling speech. And and that has led a number of people to hypothesize that the evolution of spoken language of speech evolved first for singing, for this more, like, emotional kind of made attraction, like the Jennifer Lopez, the Ricky Martin kind of songs, and so forth. And then later on, it became used for abstract communication like we're doing now.”
“You read something on a paper. The signal from the paper goes through your eyes. It goes to the back of your brain to your visual cortical regions, eventually. That visual signal then goes to your speech pathway in the motor cortex in front here in Broca's area. And you silently speak what you read in your brain without moving your muscles. And sometimes, actually, if you put electrodes, EMG electrodes, on your laryngeal muscles, even on birds, you can do this. You'll see activity there while reading or or or trying to speak silently, even though no sound's coming out.”
“So we actually, accidentally came across stuttering in songbirds and we've published several papers on this to try to figure out the neurobiological basis. The first study we had was a brain area, called the basal ganglia, the, what's the, the striatum part of the basal ganglia involved in coordinating movements, learning how to make movements. When it was damaged in these in this in the speech like pathway in these birds, what we found is that they started to stutter as the brain region recovered.”
“But if the speech pathways is next to the movement pathways, what I discover is by dancing, it is helping me think. It is helping keeping my brain fresh. It's not just moving my muscles. I'm moving or using the circuitry in my brain to do control a whole big body. You need a lot of brain tissue to do that. And so I argue, if you wanna stay cognitively intact until your old age, you better be moving and you better be doing it consistently, whether it's dancing, walking, running, and also practicing speech, oratory speech and so forth, or singing.”
“I don't think there is any good evidence for a separate language module. Instead, there is a speech production pathway that's controlling our larynx, controlling our jaw muscles, that has built within it all the complex algorithms for spoken language. And there is the auditory pathway that has built within it all the complex algorithms for understanding speech, not separate from a language module.”
“I think that the brain pathways that control speech evolved out of the brain pathways that control body movement. And that's when you talk about Italian, French, English, and so forth, each one of those languages come with a learned set of gestures that you can communicate with. The brain regions I mentioned are directly adjacent to each other.”
“When we look at the genetic data from these ancestral hominids where we can look at genes that are involved in learned vocal communication, they have the same sequence as we humans do for genes that function in speech circuits. So I think Neanderthals had spoken language. I'm not going to say it's as advanced as what it is in humans, but I think it's been there for at least between 500,000 to a million years.”
“Some of these genes, actually a number of them, that control neuroconnectivity were turned off in the speech circuit. We started to realize the function of these genes are to repel connections from forming—repulsive molecules. And so when you turn them off, they allow certain connections to form that normally would have not formed. So by turning it off, you got to gain a function for speech.”
“That has led a number of people to hypothesize that the evolution of spoken language, of speech, evolved first for singing, for this more emotional kind of mate attraction, like the Jennifer Lopez, the Ricky Martin kind of songs and so forth. And then later on, it became used for abstract communication like we're doing now.”
“When it was damaged in a speech-like pathway in these birds, what we found is that they started to stutter as the brain region recovered. It's now known, they call this neurogenic stuttering in humans, where damage to the basal ganglia or some type of disruption to the basal ganglia at a young age also causes stuttering in humans.”
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