Question: how many parts of the brain do we use when talking?

Carolyn McGettigan answered on 8 Jan 2018:

Great question – I often tell my students that speaking is a “whole brain experience”. That’s because there are so many aspects to how we do it. We have to plan what we are going to say, choose the right words, and then control our voices to say those words with the right pronunciation, in the right order, and with the appropriate tone of voice. Part of the process also involves monitoring our speech as we produce it, for example to update what we want to say, or to make sure we can correct for errors.

So, what brain regions are involved? Well, we use pretty much all of our brain, pretty much all of the time – when you’re talking your brain is also keeping your heart beating, keeping you on your feet/chair and performing many other important functions.

But which regions might be additionally important for talking? Well, some of these include parts of the brain that organise and select the sounds we are going to make, and these are located in the left side of the brain, in the frontal lobe. There’s also the motor cortex, which controls the movement of our body – including the tongue, lips, jaw and other structures that are moved around during speech. Parts of the temporal lobe are thought to be involved in monitoring the outcomes of speech in terms of what we hear, perhaps to monitor for errors. Other parts respond to the somatosensory information we get when parts of our vocal system touch each other – from those sensations we can track where structures like the tongue are moving to produce speech. We also use the cerebellum – the “little brain” that’s tucked underneath the back of the cerebral cortex (the big folded bit of the brain). This is thought to be helpful in sequencing together all of the parts of a spoken utterance.