In the course of their evolution, humans acquired cognitive abilities including language and thought. Philosophers and scientists have long struggled to determine how these abilities are organized into a unity of mind and how the biological organ of mind -- the brain -- supports these abilities. In recent years, cognitive scientists have approached the first question while neuroscientists the second one. The Mind-Articulation project aims to provide a new framework for unifying these approaches to language and thought.
The recent explosion of new technologies for noninvasive measurements of human brain activities allows us to observe parallel activation of functional brain modules in humans engaged in various mental tasks. In particular, echo-planar magnetic resonance imaging (EP-MRI) provides a powerful noninvasive method that is superior to conventional PET imaging in both spatial and temporal resolution. EP-MRI is completely noninvasive and appropriate for use with normal volunteers. Functional MRI compliments MEG(Magnetoencephalograph) technology, which reveals the time-course of brain activity to millisecond accuracy.
On the basis of this new noninvasive imaging, this joint research aims at a fusion of neuroscience and cognitive science by asking how parallel activation of brain modules is able to construct the unity of mind and to provide the physical substrate of computations with complex representations. The cognitive science groups will develop and exploit will develop the solid methodological basis for such imaging experiments, vision and imagery being the most active and fruitful domains for the study of neuronal systems at different hierarchical levels of organization and of their interactions. The neuroscience and cognitive science approaches to mind/brain meet directly in research on reading, which involves visual recognition as well as linguistic processing.
Recently, linguists have begun to understand the limitations of a cognitive science unconstrained by ever-increasing range of data from neurobiology. How can the understanding of language from linguistic research be transformed through the study of the biological basis of language? How can our understanding of the brain be transformed through the same research? Thus the long-term goal of the research is to make linguistics and brain science mutually constraining. Ultimately, a finding in cognitive neuroscience should have clear, immediate implications for our understanding of the way the brain works. At the moment, however, there are two major hurdles to the merging of brain science and linguistics. The first is that cognitive scientists, relying on standard behavioral experimentation, often appear to have more vivid understanding of the thinking brain than neuroscientists. Second, linguists have not thought about their theories of representation and computation in terms of the brain and what the brain must be doing. They need to explore different reshaping of linguistic theory to make it responsible to the sorts of data we might expect to get from looking at the brain.