Integrative Biology 131: General Human Anatomy. Fall 2005. Professor Marian Diamond. The functional anatomy of the human body as revealed by gross and microscopic examination.
The Department of Integrative Biology offers a program of instruction that focuses on the integration of structure and function in the evolution of diverse biological systems. It investigates integration at all levels of organization from molecules to the biosphere, and in all taxa of organisms from viruses to higher plants and animals.
The department uses many traditional fields and levels of complexity in forging new research directions, asking new questions, and answering traditional questions in new ways. The various...
Public Health 241, 001 - Spring 2015
Statistical Analysis of Categorical Data - Nicholas P. Jewell
Creative Commons 3.0: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
When you're suddenly able to understand someone despite their thick accent, or finally make out the lyrics of a song, your brain appears to be re-tuning to recognize speech that was previously incomprehensible.
University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientists have now observed this re-tuning in action by recording directly from the surface of a person's brain as the words of a previously unintelligible sentence suddenly pop out after the subject is told the meaning of the garbled speech. The re-tuning takes place within a second or less, they found.
The observations confirm speculation that neurons in the auditory cortex that pick out aspects of sound associated with language – the components of pitch, amplitude and timing that distinguish words or smaller sound bits called phonemes – continually tune themselves to pull meaning out of a noisy environment.
The findings will aid Knight and his colleagues in their quest to develop a speech decoder: a device implanted in the brain that would interpret people's imagined speech and help speechless patients, such as those paralyzed by Lou Gehrig's disease, communicate.
Holdgraf, Knight, Theunissen and their colleagues will report their findings Dec. 20 in the journal Nature Communications.
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