Stephanie Forkel, Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant worth €2 million. Her five-year project, EMERGENCE, will begin in 2026 and aims to transform our understanding of how language arises from the complex interplay of neural systems in the human brain. For more than a century, theories of language have centred on a small set of cortical regions—most famously Broca’s area, associated with...

When operating on gliomas near critical language regions, surgeons risk either leaving residual tumor or inducing permanent postoperative language deficits (PLDs). Despite the advent of intraoperative mapping techniques, subjective judgments frequently determine important surgical decisions. We aim to inform data-driven surgery by constructing a non-invasive mapping approach that quantitatively predicts the impact of individual surgical decisions on long-term language function. This study...

NEURAL 2025 “Emergent Properties of the Connected Brain” begins in Bordeaux today! The room is ready, the programmes are set, and a week of deep discussion on  emergence  is about to start. We’re welcoming an international, multidisciplinary group to explore how complex meaning arises across levels — from neural dynamics to  cognition  — using the latest  neuroimaging  tools across  neurosurgery   neuroscience   linguistics   neurology   speechandlanguagetherapy . 🧠 Tools and methods we’ll...