SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, June 27. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Hospital Universitario Nuestra Señora de Candelaria investigates how to conserve the different languages in polyglot patients who undergo surgery for brain tumors.
The objective of this intervention is to eliminate as much of the tumor as possible but without affecting the patient’s basic functions, such as speech. For this reason, it is important to know the location of each tongue in the brain in order to respect these areas during the operation.
The hospital’s neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, Jesús Martín-Fernández, has published an investigation in an international journal that tries to answer the main unknowns of polyglotism, such as the distribution of the different languages in the brain or the identification of the regions responsible for changing from one language to another.
The study has been carried out in collaboration with the Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge, in Barcelona, where Dr. Martín-Fernández traveled to carry out the research.
These tests consist of proposing certain linguistic tasks to the user while different areas of the brain are stimulated to check their behavior while the operation is performed with the patient awake. After identifying each space, the neurosurgeon can avoid affecting these areas when removing the tumor.
This research was awarded by the international research institute Quantum Brain Research Institute, for the innovation it represents in the field of neuroscience. Specifically, from the perspective of neurosurgery, it aims not only to advance knowledge of the complexity of multilingualism, it also aims to show that it is possible to preserve all languages despite undergoing surgery for a brain tumor.
INSIDE A POLYGLOT BRAIN
The brain of a polyglot person differs in the division that exists in the area that houses the language function, which is divided between the languages spoken by the patient. However, the dimension remains the same as that of a person who knows only one language.
There are some factors that affect the organization of languages within the brain such as the age of learning a second or third language, exposure and use or the degree of skill. Languages learned before the age of 7 or 8 tend to overlap in the same regions, while those learned later tend to be more dispersed in the cerebral cortex and even need more regions than those learned in childhood.
The different languages within a multilingual brain are activated simultaneously, therefore, they need certain brain regions to ‘mute or turn off’ those languages that are not the one used at that moment.
This function, in charge of voluntarily changing the language and avoiding interference from the rest, is called ‘language switching’. This function can and should be monitored during awake surgery, performing language tests, since conserving the different regions of each language is not enough if the ability to manage them is lost.
