How do Bilingual Brains Navigate Between Languages? - Mind Your Own Madness || LIVE

[00:00:01]I cried [singing] a river over you.

[00:00:06]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Good morning, everyone, and welcome again. [music] I hope you're doing well and fine.

[00:01:03]I'm good.

[00:01:05]Better than yesterday.

[00:01:07]So, today we have if everything goes smooth, we have What?

[00:01:20]No, that's not my monitor. Something's going bad already.

[00:01:29]Let me check.

[00:01:31]That's strange.

[00:01:38]Bear with me a second, please. Okay. Now we Now we are okay.

[00:01:45]This is the article. How do bilingual brains navigate between languages?

[00:01:50][music] Scientists discover geometric neural map.

[00:01:56]Ooh, this is from uh the author is Silvia Cernia Clark.

[00:02:04]And is from Rice News, Rice University News and Media Relations, Office of Public Affair.

[00:02:14]Let's go.

[00:02:20]Anyone Anyone Oh, the music is too loud.

[00:02:24]Let's go. Now.

[00:02:27]Anyone who speaks more than one language knows the feeling of expressing the same thought through entirely different linguistic lenses.

[00:02:40]How many languages do you speak? Let me know.

[00:02:44]I speak Spanish and Italian and a little bit of English and just a bit of German.

[00:02:56]And French.

[00:02:57]French, sorry. A new study by researchers at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine reveals that the key to this translation ability [music] is a shared geometric map of neural responses in the hippocampus.

[00:03:16]Geometric map of neural responses, that sounds cool.

[00:03:23]The research published today in the journal Cell shows that most individual neurons respond differently [music] to different languages, even though there are also a small number of cross-language neurons. Oh.

[00:03:41]I.E. cells whose responses to [music] equivalent words, like the Spanish tierra and the English earth, are correlated.

[00:03:52]However, for the most part, [music] neurons tune themselves differently for each language, but they preserve a shared overall geometric organization.

[00:04:06]The special relationship between concepts is relatively stable in neural space across languages.

[00:04:15]Ooh, that sounds like an LLM. We're talking about AI here.

[00:04:22]These findings provide one of the most detailed [music] looks yet at how the brain supports bilingualism and may help explain how people can effortlessly translate thoughts between languages without confusing them. Okay, [music] I confused them.

[00:04:43]Researchers studied four fluently bilingual English-Spanish speakers undergoing neurosurgical procedures for epilepsy treatment. There's always a an epileptic patient being [music] under surgery for these kind of studies.

[00:05:03]Thank you to all of them.

[00:05:06]Using ultra-high resolution recording technologies, including microelectrodes and Neuropixels probes, the team measured the activity of hundreds of individual neurons in the hippocampus while participants listened stories listen at two stories, read phrases aloud, and engaged in spontaneous conversations in both English and Spanish.

[00:05:37]Our findings suggest that the brain may store meaning in a language-independent format.

[00:05:45]Okay, I need to read this again. Our findings suggest that the brain may store meaning in a language-independent format. Okay.

[00:05:57]Said Dr. Samir.

[00:06:00]Said Samir said, sorry, Dr. Samir said, professor of neurosurgery, McNair Scholar and Cullen Foundation and Dow Chair at Baylor College of Medicine.

[00:06:14]What a title.

[00:06:16]And co-senior author of the study, "Different languages appear to access a shared conceptual map rather than creating entire separate representations of the world."

[00:06:34]The researchers describe Sorry.

[00:06:36]>> [cough and clears throat] >> The researchers describe the phenom- this phenomenon as a shared semantic geometry.

[00:06:44]Semantic geometry, what a beautiful name. "Instead of using identical neurons for each language, the brain appears to preserve the relationships between concepts across languages while allowing each language to use its own neural read-out axis."

[00:07:06]Cool. "This helps explain how bilingual people can switch between languages so fluidly," said Benjamin Hayden, adjunct professor of electrical and computer engineering and linguistics and linguistics at Rice, professor of neurosurgery and McNair Scholar at Baylor and co-senior author of the study.

[00:07:35]He says, "The brain seems to maintain a common internal structure for meaning while simus- simult- simultaneously, sorry, keeping languages distinct enough to avoid interference.

[00:07:49]Ooh.

[00:07:56]We are talking here in some kind of topological algebraic mathematics.

[00:08:04]These findings suggest that translation is not driven primarily by special- specialized dictionary neurons, but instead emerges from coordinate activity across large neural population.

[00:08:22]This sounds to me like this semantic relational matrix in coding or programming.

[00:08:34]"Our results shout that show that bilingual meaning is an emergent property of neural populations," said lead author Xinjun Yang, postdoctoral scholar.

[00:08:48]"The brain does not appear to rely on one-to-one translation cells. Instead, it preserves patterns of relationships among concepts across languages."

[00:09:01]To analyze the neural data, or data, the researchers compared human brain activity to multilingual artificial intelligence language models.

[00:09:12]Cool. Including multilingual BERT.

[00:09:18]I don't know what BERT is. They found striking similarities between the geometry of semantic representations in the hippocampus and the internal organization of modern AI systems trained on multiple languages.

[00:09:36]Relat- relational database or semantic database are these kind of tools that someone does before training an AI even.

[00:09:53]Large language models and the human brain may be converging on similar computational solutions for representing meaning, Heiden said.

[00:10:03]Does that does not mean AI works exactly like the brain, but it suggests there may be universal principles for organizing knowledge.

[00:10:14]Yes.

[00:10:19]Relational databases.

[00:10:22]In addition to advancing basic neuroscience, these findings eventually could influence the development of brain-computer interfaces.

[00:10:32]That's already happening. Language rehabilitation therapies therapies and future AI systems designed to communicate more naturally with humans.

[00:10:48]Interestingly, beyond the scientific arena, the discovery may be of broader interest in the humanities and social sciences.

[00:10:58]I'm going to find this semantic database, relational semantic database.

[00:11:07]What is a semantic database? It's a storage system that organizes database on its meaning and relationships rather than just structural format.

[00:11:18]Yes, very cool.

[00:11:22]You split the sentences in in parts.

[00:11:26]I check.

[00:11:28]I remember this from years ago.

[00:11:35]Uh-oh, my computer cannot handle too much so much work. That's kind of I like okay, okay.

[00:11:45]This is a good example.

[00:11:47]I believe.

[00:11:52]Huh, security check required.

[00:11:56]What's this?

[00:11:57]We detected unusual activity from your network.

[00:12:01]Ooh.

[00:12:02]Oh, that's sad.

[00:12:05]Okay.

[00:12:10]Let's go back to the article.

[00:12:15]Interestingly, beyond the scientific arena, the discovery may be [music] of broader interest in the humanities and social sciences.

[00:12:23]The concept of a stable, shared geometric neural map seems to validate a structuralist view of language.

[00:12:33]Where structuralism is an intellectual current often traced back to Swiss linguistic Ferdinand de Saussure.

[00:12:42]In brief, structuralism holds that meaning transcends holds that meaning Again, again, sorry. In brief, structuralisms No, structuralism holds that meaning transcends individual cultural expressions and instead hearkens to an underlying universal structure or system.

[00:13:09]I think I got it.

[00:13:10]Right.

[00:13:12]The researchers cautioned that the study this study involved only four participants.

[00:13:20]Oh.

[00:13:21]All of whom were English-Spanish bilinguals undergoing epilepsy treatment. Future studies will be needed to determine whether the same neural principles apply to other languages and larger populations.

[00:13:37]Still, the results provide an unprecedented unprecedented glimpse into one of the defining features of human cognition, the ability to express the same [music] thought in multiple languages.

[00:13:52]It was Lacan that said, "The unconscious has the structure of language."

[00:13:58]I think so.

[00:14:00]Okay, everyone. Thank you very much for being here. I hope you enjoyed this article.

[00:14:07]And I think I fixed my problem with OBS, so no glitches, no problems today. I'm very happy. I wish you a fantastic Friday and weekend ahead. So, see you the next one.

[00:14:23]Goodbye. [music] And thank you.

[00:14:41]>> Let's rock your hips to what he's doing.

[00:14:47]Let's rock your hips to what he's doing.

[00:14:52]>> [snorts] [snorts] [snorts] [snorts] [snorts] [snorts] [snorts] >> Come on and cry me [music] a river.

[00:15:44]Cry me a river.

[00:15:49]I cried a [singing] river over you.

[00:15:54]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music]