Kristina Simonyan, MD, PhD

Department of Neurology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY

In the past few years, several studies have been directed to understanding the complexity of functional interactions between different brain regions during various human behaviors. Among these, neuroimaging research installed the notion that speech and language require an orchestration between brain regions for comprehension, planning and integration of a heard sound with a spoken word. However, these studies have been largely limited to mapping the neural correlates of separate speech elements and examining distinct cortical or subcortical circuits involved in different aspects of speech control. As a result, our understanding of the complexity of the brain network machinery controlling speech and language remained largely unknown. In my talk, I will examine functional brain networks of increasing hierarchy from the resting state to motor output of syllables to complex production of real-life speech in order to identify the intermediate steps in the formation of the large-scale speech network topology.