Research Hit: Your Time Travelling Neurons

How certain neurons know what you're going to say before you say it

Wow, our brain cells can time travel (said sarcastically)!

I’m not sure if it would be a good thing if our neurons could time travel but it is always fascinating to see that our brain responds before we know it ourselves.

There was a famous piece of research a while back that showed that the signature of decisions could be identified in the brain before people were conscious of it - the individuals thought they made a decision later, but the activity showed that the brain had already decided before. It seems like our brains decide and then we take a bit of time to catch up and interpret this as our decision.

Similarly, the ability of the brain to predict is essential to survival. And in this study researchers were investigating neural signatures of language processing with a view to helping stroke survivors or those with brain damage. And in doing this they stumbled across some interesting insights into how our brains, or specific neurons, prepare and predict our speech patterns.

Isn’t that logical - we prepare something first to say it?