OHBM 2026: Language Across Brain Systems and the Lifespan — does language live only in words?
OHBM 2026: Language Across Brain Systems and the Lifespan — does language live only in words?
OHBM 2026 brings a very fertile theme for anyone who wants to think about language without falling into an overly narrow model: Language Across Brain Systems and the Lifespan. Within this session, topics include Decoding Language Identity from Whole-Brain fMRI During Bilingual Picture Naming, Neural substrates of orthographic coding in skilled deaf readers, Maturation of the arcuate fasciculus in relation to language development around 1 year of age, and Language and attention crowding revealed through a multi-scale perspective on brain lateralization. This combination alone already signals an important shift: language is not being treated only as standard speech, a monolingual brain, and linear reading. The program itself opens space for bilingualism, development, reading in deaf individuals, and different forms of lateralized language organization.
This has major value for a Decolonial Neuroscience reading. For a long time, the science of language risked taking a very specific subject as its norm: hearing, monolingual, schooled within a dominant literacy pattern, and inserted into relatively homogeneous contexts. But real life has never worked that way. Many people grow up between two languages, between speech and gesture, between orality and writing, between family codes and school codes, between listening, lip reading, signing, accents, and different ways of naming the world.
In Brain Bee language, the question can become:
Does someone who grows up between two languages, gestures, or different modes of communication organize the brain in a different way?
This is a strong question because it brings neuroscience closer to lived experience. Adolescents understand this quickly. Everyone knows someone who changes language depending on context, mixes languages, relies more on gesture, reads the room before speaking, or feels that school demands a form of expression different from the one used at home. The point of OHBM 2026 is that this now appears more clearly within the scientific agenda itself.
Here, the avatars that help most are Olmeca and APUS.
Olmeca matters because language is never only neural structure. Language is also culture, territory, life history, symbolic hierarchy, school, class, collective memory, and a form of belonging. When OHBM 2026 includes themes such as bilingual picture naming and skilled deaf readers, it opens space to think of different linguistic trajectories not as deviations from a single norm, but as legitimate modes of organization between brain, culture, and experience.
APUS matters because language is also body in space. It is rhythm, pause, gesture, gaze, distance, timing, posture, and environment. Not all language lives first in the word. Many times it appears in the body before it becomes a sentence. This becomes even clearer when we think about development, multimodal communication, and reading across different contexts.
The decolonial critique here does not need to be aggressive. It can be simple: much language theory remains crystallized when it treats monolingualism as the implicit standard and variation as exception. That reduces the richness of the phenomenon. The OHBM 2026 session itself suggests the opposite: there is development, there is bilingualism, there is reading in deaf individuals, there is complex lateralization, and there are multiple forms of linguistic coding.
A better question, then, would be this:
What changes in attention, memory, and the body when language grows across more than one code, more than one channel, or more than one cultural territory?
That is a good question for OHBM 2026, a good question for Brain Bee, and a very important question for Latin America. Here, language has never been just one thing. It crosses borders, accents, Indigenous languages, Spanish, Portuguese, sign languages, migration, orality, and strong regional differences.
A Brain Bee proposal for an EEG + NIRS experiment
The proposal can be simple and strong for educational purposes: compare short tasks of naming and reading in Portuguese and Spanish, or speech and gesture, or listening and reading, depending on the group. With EEG, we can observe components such as N400 and P600, linked to meaning integration and reanalysis. With NIRS, we can track activation in frontotemporal regions during these shifts in code and context.
The point would not be to decide “which group is better,” but to observe how different linguistic histories organize attention, meaning, and cognitive effort in distinct ways. The central hypothesis is direct: language does not live only in words; it also lives in the cultural and bodily trajectories that make communication possible.
Where OHBM 2026 is already pointing in this direction
This blog comes directly from the official program. The session Language Across Brain Systems and the Lifespan is scheduled as an oral session in the congress, and its topics show that language is already being treated in connection with development, bilingualism, reading in deaf individuals, and distributed brain organization. This helps shift the question.
Instead of asking only “where is language in the brain?”, the discussion can become richer: how do different ways of living language reorganize attention, lateralization, reading, and meaning-making across the lifespan?
Why this matters for Latin America
In our region, thinking about language in a narrow way would be a major mistake. Latin America is built through coexistence among languages, accents, symbolic borders, school inequalities, and diverse ways of naming the world. That is why a neuroscience built here gains so much when it stops asking only “what is the language circuit?” and starts asking also “what kind of linguistic world did this brain have to learn to inhabit?”
This is especially important for young people between 14 and 17 years old. They already understand that speaking well does not always mean speaking in the same way, and that communicating is not simply repeating a norm. If Brain Bee Latam wants to inspire new scientific questions, language is one of the best terrains for that.
The beauty of this OHBM 2026 theme is exactly that: it already leaves room to move beyond the standard monolingual brain. Our role is to widen that opening.
Instead of asking only how the brain processes words, we can ask:
What changes when someone grows up between two languages?
What does gesture do that words alone do not do?
How do reading, listening, signing, and culture reorganize the brain across the lifespan?
When neuroscience begins to measure that, it stops being only a science of standardized language and starts becoming a science of lived language.
References used in this blog
OHBM 2026 — oral session “Language Across Brain Systems and the Lifespan”, including Decoding Language Identity from Whole-Brain fMRI During Bilingual Picture Naming, Neural substrates of orthographic coding in skilled deaf readers, Maturation of the arcuate fasciculus in relation to language development around 1 year of age, and Language and attention crowding revealed through a multi-scale perspective on brain lateralization.
OHBM 2026 Schedule at a Glance — confirmation that Language Across Brain Systems and the Lifespan is scheduled as an oral session in the congress.
