BY EKATERINA DOBRYAKOVA
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See David Poeppel's OHBM2016 Keynote Lecture here:
https://www.pathlms.com/ohbm/courses/3189/video_presentations/33864
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Today, we're talking to David Poeppel, finding out about the differences between animal and human communication systems, his role in developing models of language processing, and in peeling away the 'speechyness' of speech. Dr. Poeppel is a Professor of Psychology at the New York University and Director of the Department of Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. As one of the OHBM 2016 keynote speakers, Dr. Poeppel discussed how research in the neurobiology of language has developed over the last 20 years. We took the opportunity to find out more about his research on speech perception and psychophysics.

Ekaterina Dobryakova: To start, I wondered why you decided to study language and, specifically, speech perception?

David Poeppel: Well, it's easy to want to study language because it's what makes us “us”. It’s the most convenient and compelling feature that we have. If we didn't have that, we couldn’t have this conversation. There are endless vitriolic debates about how similarly animals communicate with each other, so it's deeply fascinating. How can we understand anything? How can we talk? If you ever take a class in linguistics, it’s like opening the curtains – you suddenly understand something you didn't think could be studied by sciences, because if you take a language class, let's say, in middle school or high school, they drown you with minutia in a very boring way and they try to take all the joy out. We've all taken second language French or Spanish in high school--oh my God, you know, what a nightmare--but if you suddenly think of it as a problem for sciences, it becomes a completely different kind of thing.

ED: You mentioned animal communication. How would you say our human communication through language is similar to non-language communication between animals?

DP: That is a good, hard, deep question for which we have no good answer. Animals are at the periphery, using the apparatus we have, the input systems and the output systems. We can learn a lot from studying animal communication systems. But there are certain attributes of human language that are just quite different, and for which we have no compelling animal model. So, some of the things we study are birdsongs or gestural communication. And those are wonderful important additions to our knowledge. But there are certain attributes of being a speaker of the language as a human that are unusual and that includes the peculiarly structured and complicated vocabulary.

ED: What is one of the most important projects that you are focusing on in your lab and how is it relevant to society?

DP: My laboratory focuses on basic science. That is, basic questions about the organization of perceptual systems, the auditory system and how we process language. We don't build products, diagnoses, therapeutic interventions. But of course the long term goal is that the insights we bring will help in all of these issues: for group communication, diagnosis, stroke, disease or rehabilitation, developmental disorders, you name it. So some of the work we've done has some very interesting and practical implications for developmental speech disorders. Max Planck has a good one-liner: ‘The application has to be preceded by basic insight’. I think this is very right: to really try to understand the system and its parts, and how they interact before you build the thing. You know, you want me to test the stuff before I give you a pill. 

ED: What would you say is your most surprising finding? 

​DP: The most surprising finding is that we ever find anything! That's why we're at this OHBM 2016 meeting. One of the remarkable things of the last 20 or 30 years is the astonishing technical development, the devices that we all use. This is quite a remarkable achievement. I remember when I was a graduate student and I read the first papers on imaging, some of which were actually on language, I was both simultaneously excited and appalled. And it really stimulated me and made me very passionate about the stuff. But notice that until 20 years ago we were not able to do any of the things we're now addressing. It was inconceivable. Let's say there was the age of fascination, the age of growth. Now, I think, we're beginning to enter the age of maturity,  where we can celebrate the amazing tools we have and the techniques and analytic approaches we have, and we can start to feel a bit critical about our own research. 

So here are two things that I've worked on a lot in my lab, both of which, I naively hope, have some value: One is really questions about the structural organization of the brain. So with one of my close colleagues, Greg Hickok from Irvine, for many years we've developed a functional and anatomical model, pretty widely known as the dual stream model of language processing, which admittedly we stole straight from the visual system. We know a lot about the visual system and its anatomical physiological foundations, and some of those ideas struck us as potentially useful for the language system. 
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The second thing is the work that I've been focusing on for a number of years on neurophysiology and there, primarily, I’ve been using magnetoencephalography, MEG. It’s the technique I’ve begun to obsess about the last few years, primarily because perceptual processing and language processing is super fast. 

ED: What is your biggest dream in research?

DP: Maybe your dreams get more modest as you cross into the precarious years of middle age. Of the many dreams I have for my labs, one that I'm particularly obsessing about right now is: What does it mean to store your words. Those are sort of at the intersection of everything. There are a hundred thousand things stored in your memory in a way that they can be listened to, spoken, read, signed. That means that the encoding of that is extremely complicated and subtle. 

ED: What do you think is the coolest finding in the neuroimaging of language?

DP: I'd have to say all of my own [laughs]. I'll tell you one that I care about right now and I think is cool: there continues to be a long debate about specialization in the brain. Let's take speech perception. Speech perception is the transformation of acoustic information (so something hits your ear) into some code that's relatively abstract and that interfaces with linguists. Now, for 50 years there's been a very vigorous debate if that is a special mechanism or is it a generic mechanism. So, is speech perception merely a species of hearing, or is it actually something that deals with particular functions? And so, last year, in a very elaborate series of fMRI experiments in my lab, we tackled this question one more time, trying to really nail down the extent to which there is specialization, in part, building on our dual stream model. We predicted that some very specific chunks of cortex, particularly, aspects of the superior temporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus are not just generic auditory analyzers but are specialized for speech. That doesn't mean that entire area is specialized, but that means that there are populations of cells there that really deal with that kind of signal. So we went to great effort to make stimuli which could selectively peel away the speech-yness of signal and see can you find an area in your head that has the right sensitivity for speech and the right specificity. That was the kind of an experiment that was not just one experiment but 10. But at the end, it is pretty satisfying, because you feel like you really nailed it. I think, we can say pretty conclusively, that there is a high degree of specialization in a particular area of the brain. That's kind of cool because it shows that you can take a pretty innovative technique like functional MRI and answer a classical question.  

ED: Many thanks!

BY EKATERINA DOBRYAKOVA
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See Anissa Abi-Dargham's OHBM2016 keynote lecture here:
https://www.pathlms.com/ohbm/courses/3233/video_presentations/33867
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The Organization for Human Brain Mapping hosted an exciting lecture on June 30th, 2016 with Dr. Anissa Abi-Dargham who presented her work pertaining to the topography of dopamine alteration in schizophrenia through the use of PET imaging.
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Anissa Abi-Dargham is a Professor of Psychiatry and Radiology at CUMC, Columbia University, and New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she directs the Division of Translational Imaging. Dr. Abi-Dargham is a pioneer in PET neuroimaging, beginning her research in the field of dopamine transmission in schizophrenia in the 1990s. Her research has resulted in seminal findings that explain the complex alterations of dopamine transmission in schizophrenia and the impact these alterations have on clinical symptoms, cognition and response to treatment.

Ekaterina Dobryakova: What motivated you to go into your particular area of research? 
Anissa Abi-Dargham: I went to medical school to become a psychiatrist and study psychosis. Out of all brain disorders psychosis seemed the most extreme to me and the most devastating on people’s lives. Brain imaging, especially molecular imaging, seemed to be a useful approach to get one step closer to the underlying “brain biology” that relates to psychosis. When I started there was much interest in dopamine in schizophrenia so I did some of these studies with my colleagues and one finding led to the next question and next study. Now we have greater understanding of the complexities of this system in schizophrenia.

ED: If you weren't talking to brain mappers or scientists, how would you describe your most proud scientific accomplishment?
AA: It must be the study where I estimated amounts of dopamine (a transmitter in the brain used between nerve cells to transmit signals) and compared patients with schizophrenia and controls. To do so I had to remove most if not all dopamine in the brain (by giving a treatment that stops new synthesis or production of dopamine for 48 hours, this is called a depleted state) and then compared the baseline scan (before depletion) to the depleted scan to derive how much dopamine was removed, thus inferring how much dopamine was present at baseline.

ED: If you were speaking to a non-scientist, how would you describe your research and what you do for a living?
AA: The brain is a complicated and intricate super computer that remains like a black box. It is difficult to understand its normal functioning, much less its dysfunctional function in brain disorders. I use imaging techniques to get at some of these questions. 

ED: What do you think are the most pressing issues in neuroimaging for your area of interest? For the field in general?
AA: Technology, funding, collaborations: we need to develop better tools, that are safe to use and not invasive so we can image the complexity of the brain.  We need participants in research and multi site collaborations to have enough power to address the variability across human subjects, and funding to do all that.

ED: What do you think is the future of neuroimaging for basic research? For translational research and application?
AA: Imaging can serve as an ideal translational tool to understand and link the effects of genes onto cells, circuits an behavior. Animal models can provide an illustration of genes’ effects which can be searched for in humans. So imaging can bridge all these multi-levels of investigation across species.

ED: When you first started out, what was the most inspiring/motivating paper you read? How about the same question, but in the last 5 years?
AA: Tough question because there were / are too many.  An inspiring one was that of Surmeier and Gerfen summarizing the circuitry involving direct and indirect pathways in the striatum, I often read it and re-read it.
In the last 5 years I would say some of the main papers marking major advances in the field, for example the genetics findings in schizophrenia published in Nature 2014. But others too, it is really hard to pick just one…

ED: ​What should the non-expert be wary of when reading about brain mapping articles in the lay press?
AA: Since imaging is very technical it is difficult for the non-expert to judge if a study is methodologically sound. That is the biggest issue. Another is small sample sizes and hyper inflated results.  In general findings need to be replicated for one to start to believe them.

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BY: OHBM BLOG TEAM
At the recent OHBM Annual Meeting in Geneva, we encountered an interesting variety of ways that people both chronicled their personal experience at the meeting and engaged with the material of sessions attended. Many people vigorously took notes, others live-tweeted or posted photographs of slides and presenters online, but one of the most unique examples we discovered was a meeting attendee who was live-sketching session speakers and posting them to instagram.

The live-sketching artist, Roselyne Chauvin, is a PhD Candidate and founder of Cogni' Junior and lives in the Netherlands.  When asked about how she started doing this type of drawing, Chauvin replied "Well, I do a lot of popularization of science for children (cognijunior.org) so a lot of non-scientists/teachers are following me on social media. I thought live-sketching the conference was a nice way to show that researcher meetings are not boring and, in general, to fill the gap between the general public and us. In the meantime, I discovered that it helps me to keep focus between all those amazing talks and to remember more of them. It's also saying to scientists that can't make it and want to catch some glimpses of it via twitter: you are not forgotten. Not everyone can fly to Geneva, right?"

The images below are from keynote lectures, educational courses, oral sessions and symposia. Think you know some of these speakers? Recognize material you learned in an OHBM session? See how many sketches you can identify. 

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