Research from the Brain Institute of the University of Southern California (USA) shows that when we listen to or read stories (of any kind), brain patterns appear that transcend culture and language: a universal code behind the narrative.
Following a narrative and understanding its meaning may seem easy to us, but it is quite a cognitive challenge that our brain orchestrates in a way that seems less complex than it really is. And it is that following a story, understanding it, implies a constant accumulation of meanings.
To unravel the networks involved in understanding stories, the experts designed a study to find out whether the same story, but in different languages, would activate similar brain regions in native speakers of those languages. Would it also be possible to determine which story was being analyzed just by looking at the brain activity of the participants?
For the experiment, they used software developed by the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, analyzing 20 million blog entries, including personal stories. They reduced the stories to 40 , with topics about telling a lie or getting over a divorce. These stories were finally condensed into a 150 word paragraph . The stories were then translated into Mandarin Chinese and Farsi (a language spoken in Iran).
In all, 90 participants of American, Chinese and Iranian descent read the stories as their brains were being scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging.
The scientists used advanced machine learning and text analysis techniques, including an analysis with 44 billion classifications, to reverse engineer the data from the scans.
In this way, they were able to determine which story a participant was listening to or reading in any of the three selected languages , solely from measurements of brain activity. In other words, the researchers were able to read the minds of the participants by reading the stories.
“Even taking into account the fundamental differences in language, such as languages that can be read in a different direction or contain a completely different alphabet, there is something universal about what happens in the brain at the moment we are processing narratives, ” says Morteza Dehghani, leader of the work.
Where were these universal patterns found?
The distinctive patterns created in the readers’ brains were measured in an area called the default neural network. This region links a series of interconnected parts, including the medial prefrontal cortex, the inferior parietal lobe, the posterior cingulate cortex, the hippocampal formation, and the lateral temporal cortex.
Historically, this network is supposed to be “a kind of automatic pilot” for the brain when it is at rest. In recent years, however, science has shown that this is not the case.
The brain does not rest
Previous findings suggest that the default neural network is activated when the mind appears to be at rest and was only active when we are retrieving autobiographical memories, for example. The following studies, including this one, suggest that this network is working in the background while the mind is ostensibly at rest to continually find meaning in the narrative.
“One of the greatest mysteries in neuroscience is how to create meaning outside the world. Stories are deeply embedded in the core of our nature and help us create this meaning,” says Jonas Kaplan, co-author of the work.
This study and others like it bring us one step closer to understanding how to accomplish this complex feat so quickly and easily.
Referencia: Decoding the Neural Representation of Story Meanings across Languages. Morteza Dehghani Reihane Boghrati Kingson Man Joseph Hoover Sarah Gimbel Ashish Vaswani Jason Zevin Mary Immordino Andrew Gordon Antonio Damasio Jonas Kaplan . Human Brain Mapping. 2017 10.17605/OSF.IO/QRPP3
