Localizing language in the brain

http://www.labspaces.net/112920/Localizing_language_in_the_brain_

Fedorenko, E., & Kanwisher, N. (2011). Some Regions within Brocaʼs Area Do Respond More Strongly to Sentences than to Linguistically Degraded Stimuli: A Comment on Rogalsky and Hickok (2011). Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 23(10): 2632-2635.

http://web.mit.edu/bcs/nklab/publications.shtml

"Brains are different in their folding patterns, and where exactly the different functional areas fall relative to these patterns," Fedorenko says. "The general layout is similar, but there isn't fine-grained matching." So, she says, analyzing data by "aligning brains in some common space … is just never going to be quite right."

Ideally, then, data would be analyzed for each subject individually; that is, patterns of activity in one brain would only ever be compared to patterns of activity from that same brain. To do this, the researchers spend the first 10 to 15 minutes of each fMRI scan having their subject do a fairly sophisticated language task while tracking brain activity. This way, they establish where the language areas lie in that individual subject, so that later, when the subject performs other cognitive tasks, they can compare those activation patterns to the ones elicited by language.