Is Speaking in Tongues Language?

There's nothing new in the proposition that tongues-speaking is not normally language, but rather language-like. What we have here is a report that brain imaging shows that the speech centres are not involved in the production of tongues-speech. What I'm more interested in, however, is this result;

practitioners had an unusual and permanent asymmetry in thalamic activity. The same asymmetry was found in nuns and Buddhists, which supports the theory that either intensive prayer permanently alters the brain, or that people with an abnormally functioning thalamus are more prone to having spiritual/religious experiences, according to Waldman.

I'm interested because my intuition [as a glossolalist, moreover] is that there is some similarity between the effects of tongues-speaking and meditation. These results seem to give credence to that ...
Bodyhack:
Filed in: glossolalia, brain, psychology, thalamus