In a new research at the University of California, a group of Berkeley scientists worked with seven Americans and listened to stories from the Moth Radio Hour for about more than two hours. They discovered that certain areas of the brain react to certain words, demonstrating that each area of the brain is related to a specific group of words.
This studio was developed with the help of a Magnetic Resonance Imaging. This device allows decoding the inner thoughts of the brain which is very helpful for the researchers to understand how the brain organize the language using colors in order to identify the area that reacts to similar words.
One of the researchers and the author of this study, Alex Huth said that there is a surprising similarity in the semantic topography across different subjects.
As it can be seen in the studio, different areas in the brain react to different families of related words. The map has coloring parts of the brain with different shades for each information they encode. For example, red is used for certain social concepts, while green is related to visual and tactile concepts.
“We’re trying to build an atlas just like a world atlas,” said a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and senior author on the study Jack Gallant. “If I give you a globe, you can do anything with it – you could look at how big the ocean is or what the highest mountain is or what the distance from New York to California is.”
The Brain dictionary is now available online at gallantlab.org/huth2016/
What about now?
The researchers continue with the investigations taking into account that each brain as different as our fingerprints. But the most amazing thing is the fact that each human being encodes the same things in the same ways.
“Although the maps are broadly consistent across individuals, there are also substantial individual differences,” said Gallant. “We will need to conduct further studies across a larger, more diverse sample of people before we will be able to map these individual differences in detail.”
So, complete studies in neuroscience and functional connectivity give a powerful meaning to design a map representation of the brain.
Source: Nature