Researchers discovered a brain circuit that drives vocalization and ensures that you talk only when you breathe out, and stop talking when you breathe in. This circuit is under control of a brainstem region called the pre-B tzinger complex.
MIT researchers have discovered a brain circuit that drives vocalization and ensures that you talk only when you breathe out, and stop talking when you breathe in.
Jaehong Park, a Duke University graduate student who is currently a visiting student at MIT, is the lead author of the study, which appears today in. Other authors of the paper include MIT technical associates Seonmi Choi and Andrew Harrahill, former MIT research scientist Jun Takatoh, and Duke University researchers Shengli Zhao and Bao-Xia Han.Located in the larynx, the vocal cords are two muscular bands that can open and close.
To figure that out, the researchers used a technique that allows them to map the synaptic connections between neurons. They knew that vocal cord adduction is controlled by laryngeal motor neurons, so they began by tracing backward to find the neurons that innervate those motor neurons. "Breathing is a survival need," Wang says."Even though these neurons are sufficient to elicit vocalization, they are under the control of breathing, which can override our optogenetic stimulation.
"Even though the exact mechanism and complexity of vocalization in mice and humans is really different, the fundamental vocalization process, called phonation, which requires vocal cord closure and the exhalation of air, is shared in both the human and the mouse," Park says.
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