While it does n’t get much better than sex and drugs for many out there , new inquiry has found that merely learning a new word can spark up the same wages circuits in the mentality that are activate during enjoyable activities such as these . No wonder there are so many bookworm and scrabble freak out there .
Human languageis a unique phenomenon that split up us from other members of the fauna realm . The emergence of language was a tremendously important step in our phylogenesis because it allowed humans tocooperate and portion out knowledgemore easily . But what propel us to acquire a new nomenclature from a very early historic period has been a mystery . Some hypothecate that linguistic communication - hear mechanisms may have been linked to reward tour in the brain , reinforcing the drive to learn new words . Until now , however , experimental evidence in support of this has been lacking .
For this latest study , which has been publish inCurrent Biology , researchers from Spain and Germany look at the brain activity of 36 adult participants using a technique cry functional magnetic rapport imaging ( fMRI ) . Scans were deal while the participants were perform two different activities : learning the substance of raw words from context in a sentence , and a play task .
During both parole find out and gambling , participant present activity in the ventral striatum , which is a core group arena involved in wages and motivation . This same region is aerate during a wide range of pleasurable activities , such as eating great food , having sex and taking drugs . During word learning activities , synchronization between the cortical language region and the ventral corpus striatum was also increased . what is more , those with good connections between these two circuits were found to be able to hear more words than those with unaccented link .
Taken together , these resultssuggestthat the uniting of these two head electrical circuit bestowed world with an crucial advantage that ultimately resulted in the emergence of lingual acquirement . “ From the compass point of view of phylogeny , it is an interesting theory that this eccentric of mechanism could have helped human language to explicate , ” lead author Antoni Rodriguez - Fornells toldLa Vanguardia . The findings , he says , call into question whether linguistic communication is solely ware of the organic evolution of the brain cortex , and could even suggest that emotions may influence the process of speech acquisition .
[ ViaCurrent Biology , MIC , University of Barcelona ]
