Enter the universe of human language!

Unity in diversity

Did you know that there are around 7,000 different oral and sign languages in the world? From the brain's point of view, all of them are rooted in a biological capacity common to all human beings: language.

Come and trace the origins of a subset of 850 languages back to their common ancestor and discover the secrets of animal communication and its relationship to human communication.

The Evolution of the Language Brain

We´re not just similar to chimpanzees in body structure and expression. The brains of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have areas comparable to those of our own brains. Despite being a complex species, chimpanzees don't have language. So how and when did human language evolve?

In this section, visitors are invited to explore the evolution of humans through reconstructions and videos: from Australopithecus afarensis to Homo sapiens , via Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis .

The challenge of the newborn

Whether it is Portuguese, Swahili, Mandarin or sign language, children go through roughly the same stages of language acquisition. What seems so natural to children often becomes a maze of questions for researchers trying to understand the process.

How does a baby respond to language in the womb? How do children with autism who haven't developed language communicate? It's time to find out!

The Universe in the Brain

Our brains can be considered the most complex matter in existence.

In the "Open-minded" module, visitors are shown accounts of the process of diagnosing and operating on a patient with a brain tumour. The video on show includes real footage of brain surgery, so if you're easily impressed, don't linger in this area of the exhibition. There's still so much to see... the journey has only just begun!

Speech disorders

Although language develops naturally, sometimes cognitive development is altered. The breakdown of language caused by various diseases can follow specific patterns.

Explore the characteristic discourses of diseases such as anomia which leads to forgetting the names of everyday objects, or semantic paraphasia, characterised by the exchange of words.

The language labyrinth

Crying in the mother tongue and sign languages. In this part of the exhibition, visitors build sentences by switching on or off switches relating to the subject, the verb, or the order of the sentence; they listen to the cries of different babies singing melodies characteristic of their mother tongues and learn how the same message is conveyed in different sign languages. Who will dare to go through this maze?