Biolinguistics...

… is an area of research that focuses on the human faculty of language from the point of view of the natural sciences. Rather than a discipline in itself, biolinguistics is a multidisciplinary paradigm where scientists from many different fields collaborate to reach a better understanding of one of our most (if not the most) important endowments of humans as a species. Among those different disciplines we can find philosophy, linguistics, neurology, biology, paleoanthropology, primatology, ethology, genetics, psychology, computer science, and so forth. As you may guess, the object of biolinguistics is not the description of particular languages in itself (although that is an important part of it, as the subject matter of strict linguistics), but rather the faculty of language as a system of the mind, and ultimately of the brain. The main hypothesis in biolinguistics is that humans are endowed with cognitive and physio-anatomic features that allow them to acquire and use language, and that that endowment emerged in the course of the general evolution of our species. So the questions that we ask as biolinguists are essentially five: (1) what is the faculty of language: how is its architecture, and what is essential to it?; (2) how do we humans mentally process language online in perception and production? (this is the core of the discipline called psycholinguistics); (3) how is the implementation of language within the brain and the anatomic structures used in language?; (4) how is language acquired by children, and how does this acquisition affect the evolution of particular languages?; and (5) how did the faculty of language and the systems it interfaces with (cognition and motor articulatory systems) evolve in the general phylogenetic evolution of our species? I kinda think that these questions define to a great extent what  means to be a human being. For this reason, I think there's nothing more exciting than biolinguistics, and I strongly support its development as a paradigm, even though it is looked with scepticism by a number of my fellow linguists.

There used to be a group of biolinguistics in Barcelona which did a lot of things for a couple of years, but lately they're a little quiet... Click here to access their website.

(The picture shows a real human brain, but the numbers are only part of the picture :D)