About the Brain...

[Griffin]

With creating new species, I'd like to consider exploring every vantage point. However, I am a bit ignorant when it comes to the brain. School spent more time showing me where the brain was rather than showing me what exactly goes on up there. I apologize in advance if I sound ignorant.

One of my races is a subterranean species. They can move around by feeling vibrations. They are also very sensitive to light. Including the physical attributes, would this sort of evolution affect the brain? Like a smaller than normal occipital lobe and a larger parietal lobe? Any word on this would help.

In addition, another race has the ability to learn languages fairly easy like learning how to ride a bike. Would an enlarged temporal lobe make sense? Would Broca's Area play any role or none because it focuses mainly on the movement to produce sound?

I know that my readers will probably never know these things. But as someone who likes to check their bases, I want to make sure that I'm on the right track. I want to make some sense.

 

[Wanara009]

Well, for the subterranean species that navigate through vibration probably have more development on the touch center rather than hearing. If they use sonar to navigate, both their visual and hearing center would probably equally developed (since sonar is basically replacing light with sound).

For the second race, I think things like riding a bike have less with long-term memory as it is with procedural memory.

Broca Area is not about producing sound. Rather, it is about the production of language (i.e.: damage to it make it hard for people to speak/read grammatically complex sentence). Production of sound is more on motor skill, really.

You should also consider the development of cerebellum (motor coordination/learning) and brainstem (coordination between cerebrum and cerebellum). For example, organism with a cerebellum more developed than human's might have the ability to produce finer, more coordinated movement compared to human.

If you want to know more about it, I suggest asking the people here.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Bats have a larger better developed auditory cortex and a structure in the midbrain called the inferior colliculus that separates the different sounds, the ones for echolocation versus the rest, and sends them off to the cortex for spatial processing. It's mostly about working out which sounds are for echolocation and which are for other information, e.g. communication.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[bjza]

For learning languages, this would require a great deal of plasticity and connectivity, not just size. These are things an individual typically loses as we age. For added fun, language production in the brain is connected to other abilities which might be influenced. Broca's area is involved in recognizing meaningful gestures, and it's found near areas involved in risk-assessment and processing musical phrases. Wernicke's area (involved in processing meaning) is neighbor to areas involved in general auditory processing and social cognition.

On the subterranean species, the answers all dependent on the evolutionary path the species has taken. If they've had tens of millions of years to evolve independently, I'd look at cetacean evolution for a comparable case.