Thaindian News

Washington, Jan 13 (IANS) Scientists have decoded how the brain records thoughts stimulated by words, paving the way for better treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders.
“In effect, we discovered how the brain’s dictionary is organised,” said Marcel Just, professor of psychology and director, Centre for Cognitive Brain Imaging, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), who led the study.

“It is not alphabetical or ordered by the sizes of objects or their colours. It’s through the three basic features that the brain uses to define common nouns like apartment, hammer and carrot,” he added.

As researchers point out, the three codes or factors concerning basic human fundamentals are how you physically interact with the object (how you hold it, kick it, twist it and so on).

The three factors, each coded in three to five different locations in the brain, were found by a computer algorithm that searched for commonalities among brain areas in how participants responded to 60 different nouns describing physical objects.

For example, the word apartment evoked high activation in the five areas that code shelter-related words. In the case of hammer, the motor cortex was the brain area activated to code the physical interaction.

“To the brain, a key part of the meaning of hammer is how you hold it and it is the sensory-motor cortex that represents hammer holding,” said CMU’s Cherkassky.

The research also showed that the noun meanings were coded similarly in all of the participants’ brains, said a CMU release.

“This result demonstrates that when two people think about the word ‘hammer’ or ‘house’, their brain activation patterns are very similar,” said Mitchell, head of the CMU Machine Learning in its School of Computer Science.

These findings were published in the Tuesday edition of PLoS One.