By listening to the brains of living people, scientists have created the highest-resolution map yet of the neurons that encode the meanings of different words 1. The results suggest that the brain uses the same standard categories across individuals to classify words - helping us convert sound into meaning.

The study is based on English words only. But it's a step toward figuring out how the brain stores words in its language library, says neurosurgeon Ziv Williams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. By doing the map overlapping groups of brain cells that respond to different words, he says: “we can try to build a dictionary of meanings”.

The work was done todayNaturepublished.

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The area of ​​the brain called Auditory cortex is called, processes the sound of a word when it reaches the ear. But it is the brain's prefrontal cortex, a region where higher-level activity occurs, that teases out a word's 'semantic meaning' - its essence or core.

At an earlier research point 2This process was analyzed by Images of blood flow in the brain were examined, which is a proxy for brain activity. This method allowed researchers to study the wor…

  • Jamali, M. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07643-2 (2024).
  • Tang, J., LeBel, A., Jain, S. & Huth, A. G. Nature Neurosci. 26, 858–866 (2023).

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