Revisiting language and brain expansion (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 21, 2020, 15:21 (1706 days ago) @ David Turell

The human brain uses the cerebellum for handling language. This is in addition to the usual function of coordinating muscle functions and movement of the body in all physical activities:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341730622X?via%3Dihub

"The current review made systematic attempts to evaluate the cerebellar deficit hypothesis, which claims that the cerebellum contributes to dyslexia and normal reading development. We first reviewed neurobiological evidence implicating the cerebellum as a region associated with both normal and dyslexic reading. Based upon the accumulated findings, we concluded that there is compelling evidence linking individual differences in cerebellar structure and function with individual differences in reading ability. However, considerable speculation remains as to the specific nature of cerebellar contributions to reading development.

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"From this effort emerged evidence for two circuits in which there is functional connectivity between specific sectors of the cerebellum, and dorsal and ventral cerebral reading pathways. Based upon the term overlap across the regions within the circuits and the extent literature, we propose that the dorsal circuit supports orthographic-phonological decoding at the sub-lexical level, with the cerebellum playing a modulatory role that improves phonological processing and thus decoding performance. We also propose that the ventral circuit supports lexicalized decoding, in which the pronunciation of unfamiliar words is based upon analogy to previously learned words. Although sparse, a literature on cued-word retrieval tasks suggests the cerebellum may play a modulatory role that improves the retrieval of word knowledge from semantic memory, and thus decoding performance. Because successful decoding is linked to the acquisition of orthographic knowledge, the interconnection of the cerebellum with dorsal and ventral reading pathways may thus indirectly support the automatisation of visual word recognition.

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"Continued efforts to integrate the cerebellum – a brain structure with an enormous computation power that drives learning – into neuroanatomical models of reading and dyslexia is important for understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie reading development and which contribute to individual differences in reading ability."

Comment: With these findings it indicates our cerebellum is a part of the brain far advanced from the cerebellum in other primates. The circuits described show how our cerebellum is integrated with the cerebrum. Once again our most unusual brain is demonstrated in new studies. The Difference of Man and The Difference it Makes still is a major point in the proof of God.