Summary

Chapter 6 looks at the mechanisms and evolution of human language. Language, like vision, is processed in different, specialized areas of the brain, so damage to one region can affect some aspect of language without wiping it out entirely. Ramachandran presents the case of Dr. Hamdi, the father of one of his colleagues, whose blood clot left him unable to string together grammatically complex or complete sentences, but still generally able to get his point across. Different regions of the brain account for lexicon, semantics and syntax, and researchers like Ramachandran are still working to understand the connections between them. He says that it is entirely possible that each of these developed separately, because studies conducted using patients like Dr. Hamdi have provided some initial evidence for this, but they are not conclusive.

The debate over where language comes from is ongoing. Ramachandran suggests...