Encrypted in our Brain's Babel
Investigator Eddie Chang has decoded cortical activity in a bilingual speaker with paralysis.
"Transfer learning expedited training of the bilingual decoder by enabling neural data recorded in one language to improve decoding in the other language. Overall, our findings suggest shared cortical articulatory representations that persist after paralysis and enable the decoding of multiple languages without the need to train separate language-specific decoders."
Source Nature
The work is under a paywall, but Dr Chang enthusiastically shares a thread in X-Twitter.
I cannot help thinking of foreign language learning implication of these findings:
-Different languages are located in the same portion of our brain. Hence, Chomsky's differentiation of language as a human characteristic vs a specific language manifestation. Languages are not that different.
-Transfer learning across languages: "data collected in a first language could significantly expedite training a decoder in the second language, saving time and effort for the user."
Beautiful.
The story goes that before Babel, we could all speak one language. That language is still encrypted in our brain. A side finding in a scientific study scratched the code's surface.
Look forward to further research.
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