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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		A language map of the brain
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:00
	Publish Date:		2016-06-04 19:00:00
	Description:		Do specific words activate certain regions of the brain? In a study funded by the National Science Foundation, neuroscientist Alexander Huth of the University of California, Berkeley imaged the brains of subjects while they listened to a radio show, then created a language map from the results. While playing a second episode of the show, the researchers were often able to predict which areas of the brain would respond to particular words. "The aspect of language that we've been investigating is mostly semantics, which is the sort of meaning of language. And it turns out that different topics or different groups of meanings seem to be represented in different parts of the brain." Although language maps can vary by person, Huth was surprised to see similar maps across different participants. "Certainly, we want to scan more people. We want to see how this generalizes to other people." Huth hopes this concept can someday be reversed, allowing us to predict words from brain activity, such as in the case of stroke patients.
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