The language network in your brain can be seen, even if you aren’t saying a word. For a study published in Nature Communications, researchers used data from more than 1,900 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to find significant support for the existence of a language-specific network of neurons in the adult human brain. They could detect this network even when the people whose brains were scanned were at rest or performing a task unrelated to language, such as putting together a puzzle or listening to music.

“The human brain appears to have a network that’s selective and necessary for language, and we can find that network from the activity in the brain alone,” said Cory Shain, lead study author and assistant professor of linguistics at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. “The simple fact that a person’s brain activity is always going up and down lets us detect where this network is with high fidelity. It’s such an important and stable structure that we can find it no matter what someone is doing.”

Shain and co-author Evelina Fedorenko of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that much of the language network generally spans the left hemisphere and frontal and temporal regions of the brain, but the details of its structure are different for each individual. The study findings could help make a range of advances, including finding therapies for the communication problems caused by strokes or other brain injuries.