Response to Skeide and Friederici: The myth of the uniquely human “direct” dorsal pathway
In their comment on our recent article [1], Skeide and Friederici [2] claim ‘that some important data not discussed by Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al. strongly support the view that there are clear qualitative, and not merely quantitative, differences between [human and nonhuman primate] species with respect to both the intrinsic functional connectivity of frontal and temporal cortices, and their direct structural connection via a dorsal white matter fiber tract.’ This obviously refers to work by Friederici and colleagues [3] emphasizing the functional importance of a direct connection between the posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTC) and Brodmann area (BA) 44 in humans, and its absence i…
Tinnitus and tinnitus disorder: Theoretical and operational definitions (an international multidisciplinary proposal)
As for hypertension, chronic pain, epilepsy and other disorders with particular symptoms, a commonly accepted and unambiguous definition provides a common ground for researchers and clinicians to study and treat the problem. The WHO's ICD11 definition only mentions tinnitus as a nonspecific symptom of a hearing disorder, but not as a clinical entity in its own right, and the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-V doesn't mention tinnitus at all. Here we propose that the tinnitus without and with associated suffering should be differentiated by distinct terms: "Tinnitus" for the former and "Tinnitus Disorder" for the latter. The proposed definition then becomes "Tinnitus is the conscious a…
Neurobiological roots of language in primate audition : common computational properties
Here, we present a new perspective on an old question: how does the neurobiology of human language relate to brain systems in nonhuman primates? We argue that higher-order language combinatorics, including sentence and discourse processing, can be situated in a unified, cross-species dorsal-ventral streams architecture for higher auditory processing, and that the functions of the dorsal and ventral streams in higher-order language processing can be grounded in their respective computational properties in primate audition. This view challenges an assumption, common in the cognitive sciences, that a nonhuman primate model forms an inherently inadequate basis for modeling higher-level language…