When you're suddenly able to understand someone despite their thick accent, or finally make out the lyrics of a song, your brain appears to be re-tuning to recognize speech that was previously incomprehensible. University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientists have now observed this re-tuning in action by recording directly from the surface of a person's brain as the words of a previously unintelligible sentence suddenly pop out after the subject is told the meaning of the garbled speech. The re-tuning takes place within a second or less, they found. The observations confirm speculation that neurons in the auditory cortex that pick out aspects of sound associated with language – the components of pitch, amplitude and timing that distinguish words or smaller sound bits called phonemes – continually tune themselves to pull meaning out of a noisy environment. The findings will aid Knight and his colleagues in their quest to develop a speech decoder: a device implanted in the brain that would interpret people's imagined speech and help speechless patients, such as those paralyzed by Lou Gehrig's disease, communicate. Holdgraf, Knight, Theunissen and their colleagues will report their findings Dec. 20 in the journal Nature Communications. ...

Programming Languages and Compilers

The "Rosenfeld Effect" Energy Symposium discussed the role of increased energy efficiency in California, in China, and on a global scale; the intersection of energy and safe drinking water in the developing world; the twin challenges of mitigating climate change and sustaining orderly markets in fluid fuels; how to turn good science into good politics; and defining, predicting, and coping with global warming. This session features William W. Nazzaroff - Chair, Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley & Professor of Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley; Robert J. Birgeneau - Chancellor, University of California, Berkeley. [events] [glopubaffairs] [scitech] Credits: producer:UC Berkeley Educational...

Abigail Marsh, an associate professor of psychology at Georgetown University, speaking at MoMiCon 2016. (For more information, visit MoMiCon.org.)