A team of scientists from the University of California at Berkeley (USA) has presented a map of the brain that shows how the meanings of the words in a narrative take shape in our thinking organ; that is, a map that locates where words are represented -in our brain- as we hear them.
Researchers have discovered that similar data associated with either people, numbers or places are grouped in very specific and different sectors of the brain. To reach this conclusion, they conducted an experiment using magnetic resonance imaging while a group of seven volunteers listened to a series of stories on the radio.
By monitoring their brain activity, the scientists were able to map the semantic representations of the words in the brains of each of the participants. They then used a specific algorithm to find the common features of the seven individual maps in order to obtain a global semantic atlas.
The result is this semantic atlas that reveals a fairly widespread distribution, over more than 100 different regions of the brain, through the two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. In addition, brain areas with specific concepts such as food, people, places, living beings or numbers have been located.
The authors state that this study, which has been published in the journal Nature, could help to understand the neurobiological basis of language.
