Gregory Hickok
  • December 2, 2025

  • Greg Hickok, cognitive sciences and language science, The Transmitter, Dec. 2, 2025

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In his new book, Hickok provides a detailed overview of the research into the circuits that control speech and language. In this excerpt from Chapter 5, he shares how meeting his colleague David Poeppel led to them developing the theory for bilateral speech perception.

“I met David Poeppel during my stint as a postdoctoral fellow in Steven Pinker’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) between 1991 and 1993. David and I were both funded by the new McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, me as a postdoc and David as a graduate student. The prospects for the field at that time were dynamic and exciting. The first positron emission tomography (PET) studies of language and other cognitive abilities were emerging, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which offered the hope of a completely noninvasive and widely available method for measuring neural activity with high spatial resolution, had just been invented. At the same time, magnetoencephalography (MEG) was also being developed, which held promise for high-temporal-resolution measurements of auditory and speech processes. It was a good time to be in one of the world’s first cognitive neuroscience programs.”

Continue reading: https://www.thetransmitter.org/language/wired-for-words-the-neural-architecture-of-language-an-excerpt/ 

 

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