Monkeys heed neural calls of the wild

A part of the brain that’s involved in sound processing shows pronounced activity when rhesus monkeys hear their comrades vocalizing but not when the same animals hear other sounds, a new brain-scan investigation finds.

In human evolution, this call-oriented, left-hemisphere region served as a precursor of the left-brain structures that now contribute to speech understanding, propose Amy Poremba of the University of Iowa in Iowa City and her coworkers.