Lecture by Greg Cogan, Ph.D.
The use of speech and language is one of the defining characteristics of being human: It allows us to rapidly convey thoughts, ideas, and emotions with our friends and loved ones. The production of speech is a multi-step process that transforms ideas into motor plans for speech execution. Despite its ubiquity, we do not fully understand the neural mechanisms that enables this process in the healthy brain, and we have only begun to develop treatments to restore speech in people who have lost this ability. In this talk, I will discuss work from the lab that leverages the availability of direct brain recordings in neurosurgical patients to understand and treat speech. First, I will discuss recent work that validates novel high-density high channel-count electrode technologies for restoring speech through neural prostheses. Second, I will discuss work that elucidates the neural mechanisms for speech planning and execution. Together, these projects emphasize the role of direct neural recordings for understanding speech and language – fundamental components of human existence, and offer new vistas to study the human brain in health and disease.
