wsj | The human brain is a living word cloud, turning spoken language into
intricate neural patterns of meaning that we all appear to share, new
research suggests.
In research reported Wednesday in Nature,
neuroscientists at the University of California at Berkeley created a
comprehensive atlas of these patterns, showing how shades of meaning in
natural speech stir the brain.
To make it, the researchers
employed an imaging method known as functional MRI to identify places
throughout the brain stirred by the meaning of words in stories told
aloud. In the pulsed patterns of neural blood flow monitored by the
imaging device, they found a tapestry of responses with narrative
threads reaching into more than 100 areas in the cerebral cortex. This
crinkled outer layer of the brain, containing about 20 billion neurons,
plays a key role in memory, perception and awareness.
“These are maps of the meaning in language, not the words themselves,” said UC Berkeley neuroscientist Jack Gallant,
a senior researcher in the study. “The brain somehow represents the
concepts in this smooth gradient distributed across the brain.”
