"Most animals, including our primate cousins, communicate: they gesture, grimace, grunt, and sing. As a rule, however, they do not speak. So how, exactly, did humans acquire their unique talent for verbal discourse? And how do our brains manage this complex bit of communicative magic?

Scientists in the lab of Winrich Freiwald have shed new light on the underpinnings of human speech by identifying neural circuitry in the brains of monkeys that could represent a common evolutionary origin for social communication. As reported in the journal Neuron, these circuits are involved in face recognition, facial expression, and emotion. And they may very well have given rise to our singular capacity for speech..."

Read the full article on the Rockefeller University website using the link below.