"Why is every neuropundit such a raging liberal?" asks Slate writer Daniel Engber in a commentary on last week's study of threat responses in political partisans.

Speech production, like other sensorimotor behaviors, relies on multiple sensory inputs—audition, proprioceptive inputs from muscle spindles and cutaneous inputs from mechanoreceptors in the skin and soft tissues of the vocal tract. However, the capacity for intelligible speech by deaf speakers suggests that somatosensory input alone may contribute to speech motor control and perhaps even to speech learning.