How does your brain map words? Watch and Explore The Brain Dictionary
Posted on IDA-GA Social Media 8/5/2022
https://linktr.ee/IDAGeorgia
Watch and allow yourself to float for 3 minutes into this brain world. This mesmerizing video is one you will want to watch again and again. Wow. Who would like to see the creation of more SoR videos like this? After you watch the video, explore the Brain Dictionary yourself at https://gallantlab.org/huth2016/. It’s interactive!
What’s it about?
Imagine you are listening to a story. You hear the word TOP. What happens in your brain? Did you know that a single word heard can activate regions all over the brain? Yes, in BOTH HEMISPHERES, and not just in the temporal lobe! In this video, you will hear how research conducted at UC Berkeley in 2016 allowed scientists to map in great detail how the brain responds to the meanings of words (the semantic systems of the brain). We can see words grouped by meaning. The research reveals how complex and widespread the word maps in our heads really are.
Huth and Gallant and others have continued the research. See below.
The Representation of Semantic Information Across Human Cerebral Cortex During Listening Versus Reading Is Invariant to Stimulus Modality
Fatma Deniz, Anwar O. Nunez-Elizalde, Alexander G. Huth and Jack L. Gallant
Journal of Neuroscience 25 September 2019, 39 (39) 7722-7736; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0675-19.2019
2019 https://www.jneurosci.org/content/39/39/7722: SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Humans can comprehend the meaning of words from both spoken and written language. It is therefore important to understand the relationship between the brain representations of spoken or written text. Here, we show that although the representation of semantic information in the human brain is quite complex, the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical. These results suggest that the representation of language semantics is independent of the sensory modality through which the semantic information is received.
