Hey everybody, Emily Quank here. Today, Maddie Sophia and I are bringing back one of our favorite

conversations from the Land of Neuroscience. We first aired this episode in August. This is a

microwave. What we call many episodes with a few fun science facts and some listener mail.

Happy Black History Month and remember, tomorrow, we have a special episode from our colleagues

at ThroughLine about a very famous science fiction writer. Enjoy.

Today, we are talking boxing about some cool effects that happen in your brain. Wait, sorry,

did you just say talking boxing? Your little brain picked up on that, didn't it? Yeah,

is this a neuroscience episode about words or something? Last week was hashtag black in neuro week,

a week celebrating black excellence in neuroscience-related fields. And one scientist, Sarah Phillips,

is a neuro-linguist. She studies how the brain processes language. So today on the show,

what happens in the brain when we notice a grammatical mistake, according to neuroscience?

In less than 10 minutes. Just get out, boobity bob!

Okay, so earlier I did this thing that probably sounded weird to you, Emily. Yeah, your

sentence, it didn't make any sense, but you know, another day, another dollar. Okay, well,

well, so when someone does something unexpected like that when they're talking to you or

get this, even when you're reading something that doesn't follow these standard conventions of

the language, something kind of cool happens in your brain. Oh, so they can actually measure this.

Right, so when we study the brain, one of the ways that we can study brain activities is by

measuring electrical current that is flowing through your cortex, right? So the surface of your

brain, for the cells to talk to each other, they release electrical current. This is Sarah Phillips,

our expert I mentioned earlier. I am a rising fourth year PhD student in the linguistics department

at New York University, and I'm also a member of the NYU Neuralinqwistik's lab. Very cool.

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