New Discovery

Scientists have made new discoveries about the human brain. New research indicates the human brain is a living word cloud that responds to the meaning of words in more ways than scientists previously thought.

Scientists have been studying the effects that words have on the human brain. Hundreds of studies have been done, including one at the University of California, where they scanned the brains of volunteers using a magnetic resonance imager. The study was conducted while the volunteers were reading emotionally provocative autobiographical stories.

Each story contained 10,000 of the most common English words. Scientists there were then able to create a map of the brain that the meanings of words evoke in everyone. They tracked the blood flow as neurons in the brain started to fire in response to certain words the people were reading. It showed that meaning of words, instead of being focused to one half of the brain (which was the previous theory), is actually spread throughout the entire cerebral cortex.

Scientists are still unsure whether this pattern is a result of common shared culture (all volunteers were native English speakers) and whether the pattern would remain should they do the same experiment in another language, such as Hindi or Japanese. More studies and time will tell how universal this phenomenon is.