[The Pathography and Art of Beethoven, Revisited].

The musician Ludwig van Beethoven suffered from progressive hearing loss and abdominal pain, both of which can be explained by lead intoxication. With genomic analyses, Begg et al. (2023) have confirmed that the five locks of hair attributed to Beethoven were authentic.

Enhanced activations in the dorsal inferior frontal gyrus specifying the who, when, and what for successful building of sentence structures in a new language.

It has been argued that the principles constraining first language acquisition also constrain second language acquisition; however, neuroscientific evidence for this is scant, and even less for third and subsequent languages. We conducted fMRI experiments to evaluate this claim by focusing on the building of complex sentence structures in Kazakh, a new language for participants having acquired at least two languages. The participants performed grammaticality judgment and subject-verb matching tasks with spoken sentences.

[Coniin, in Five Little Pigs].

In this manuscript, I provide some insights into the novel Five Little Pigs (US title: Murder in Retrospect) by Agatha Christie, and overview the neurotoxin coniine that plays an essential role in that story. Coniine is a nicotinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist, and induces a slowly spreading effect of paralysis by acting directly on the peripheral nervous system. This agent has been used as a poison for thousands of years; indeed, the philosophical text Phaedo describes that coniine was used to put Socrates to death.

Differential networks for processing structural dependencies in human language: linguistic capacity vs. memory-based ordering.

Surface linear (left-to-right) arrangements of human languages are actually an amalgam of the core language system and systems that are not inherently related to language. It has been widely recognized that an unbounded array of hierarchically structured linguistic expressions is generated by the simplest combinatorial operation "Merge," and the notion of Merge-generability has been proposed as a key feature that characterizes structural dependencies among linguistic elements. Here we tested Merge-generable dependencies by using a Subject-Predicate matching task, which required both linguistic capacity and short-term memory.

[Brain Activations during Retrieval of Colors Based on the Context of Cartoons].

The color center exists in the bilateral fusiform gyrus, but it is unknown whether this region also functions when one retrieves color information through the context of a story. To compare the effects of presentation condition/order between color and monochrome on activations in the color center, we used high-quality cartoons with a full story. We hypothesize that retrieval of colors based on the context can be much more than color retrieval through object vision.

[Main Man, Rain Man].

The titular character of the movie Rain Man is an autistic savant, and the movie centers on his relationship with his non-autistic but selfish brother. Particularly memorable scenes involve the brothers' travels; they initially lacked empathy and understanding toward each other, but they learn and expand their relationship as they spend time together. In this manuscript, I provide examples of truly amazing visual and mathematic abilities among some high-functioning autistic savants, and I introduce several hypotheses regarding the mechanisms that may underlie autism spectrum disorder, from a neuroscience perspective.

[The Literacy of Scientific Research and Presentation].

When presenting the results of scientific research in English as a second language, a scientist must prepare effective slides and a manuscript in its final form. Moreover, precise pronunciation and diction in English is requisite to success, and potential exchanges in the question-and-answer session should be anticipated and, if possible, rehearsed. In order to achieve these goals, a sense of aesthetics is helpful, because creative powers are integral to both the arts and sciences.

Music-experience-related and musical-error-dependent activations in the brain.

Although music is one of human-unique traits such as language, its neural basis for cortical organization has not been well understood. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we tested an error-detection task with different types of musical error (pitch, tempo, stress, and articulation conditions) and examined three groups of secondary school students having different levels of music experience. First, we observed distinct activation patterns under these music conditions, such that specific activations under the pitch condition were consistently replicated for all tested groups in the auditory areas, as well as in the left language areas under the articulation condition.

[The Pathography and Art of Beethoven].

The musician Ludwig van Beethoven suffered from hearing impairment and abdominal pain beginning in his mid-twenties. Lead intoxication can cause both of neural symptoms and digestive disorders. Lead was often present in poor-quality wines at that period, and thus Beethoven could have ingested a large amount of lead through daily wine consumption.

Modality-Dependent Brain Activation Changes Induced by Acquiring a Second Language Abroad.

The dynamic nature of cortical activation changes during language acquisition, including second-language learning, has not been fully elucidated. In this study, we administered two sets of reading and listening tests (Pre and Post) to participants who had begun to learn Japanese abroad. The two sets were separated by an interval of about 2 months of Japanese language training.

Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval.

It remains to be determined how different inputs for memory-encoding, such as the use of paper notebooks or mobile devices, affect retrieval processes. We compared three groups of participants who read dialogues on personal schedules and wrote down the scheduled appointments on a calendar using a paper notebook (Note), an electronic tablet (Tablet), or a smartphone (Phone). After the retention period for an hour including an interference task, we tested recognition memory of those appointments with visually presented questions in a retrieval task, while scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Enhanced activations in syntax-related regions for multilinguals while acquiring a new language.

The neuroscientific foundation of multilingualism, a unique cognitive capacity, necessitates further elucidation. We conducted an fMRI experiment to evaluate the acquisition of syntactic features in a new language (Kazakh) for multilinguals and bilinguals. Results showed that the multilinguals who were more proficient in their second/third languages needed fewer task trials to acquire Kazakh phonology.

[Multilingualism and the Development of the Brain].

Multilingualism is merely a parametric variation in the faculty of natural language, and it is possible to simultaneously acquire multiple languages, including dialects, at any age. While acquisition of a native language, which occurs in synchrony with development of the brain, is a multiple-step process, second language acquisition is continuous. Here, we introduce the Cumulative-Enhancement model, which states that acquisition of one additional language is beneficial for the subsequent acquisition of another.

[Brain Activations Reflecting Mental States Induced by the Context of Cartoons].

Although context can be presumed to exert effects on both language and visual information processing, the relevant brain regions have not been elucidated. In the present study, we used silent manga to focus on mental states induced by visual stimuli alone. When participants read manga on a double-page spread with preserved context, significant activation was observed in the bilateral visual cortex and cerebellum.

[The Last Lecture of Professor Masao Ito: The Cerebellum and Cerebrum].

Comment Professor Masao Ito's last lecture, delivered at the University of Tokyo Faculty of Medicine on March 7, 1989, is reproduced here in an abridged form. Its original title was "the Cerebellum and Cerebrum," and this lecture was a real masterpiece, full of insights and suggestions on brain functions, together with humorous phrases here and there. When I tried to reproduce this lecture by using all figures at that time, just one week after Professor Ito passed away, I was struck by his foresight even after thirty years.

[The Brain, the Source of Multilingualism].

Multiple languages can be used at command, if those language abilities were acquired in childhood. In this article, we report the possibility that such abilities are retained throughout adulthood for linguistic savants. We focus on Emil Krebs, a speaker of dozens of languages, and argue about the vast capacity of the multilingual brain.

Activation changes of the left inferior frontal gyrus for the factors of construction and scrambling in a sentence.

Our previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have indicated that the left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus (L. dF3op/F3t) and left lateral premotor cortex (L. LPMC) are crucial regions for syntactic processing among the syntax-related networks.

Differential Signatures of Second Language Syntactic Performance and Age on the Structural Properties of the Left Dorsal Pathway.

In adult second language (L2) acquisition, individual differences are considerably large even among people with similar experiences. The neural mechanisms underlying this variability would include structural plasticity of language-related pathways. To elucidate such neuroplasticity, we focused on the transitional period of adolescence, which is associated with certain plasticity toward maturation following the sensitive period of language acquisition (≤12 years old).

Dissociating Effects of Scrambling and Topicalization within the Left Frontal and Temporal Language Areas: An fMRI Study in Kaqchikel Maya.

Some natural languages grammatically allow different types of changing word orders, such as object scrambling and topicalization. Scrambling and topicalization are more related to syntax and semantics/phonology, respectively. Here we hypothesized that scrambling should activate the left frontal regions, while topicalization would affect the bilateral temporal regions.