Ultra-detailed brain map shows neurons that encode words’ meaning
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One set of neurons (artist's illustration) encodes the meaning of the word 'duck'; an overlapping set encodes the meaning of the word 'egg.' Credit: Juan Gaertner/Science Photo Library
By eavesdropping on the brains of living people, scientists have created the highest-resolution map yet of the neurons that encode the meaning of various words1. The results hint that, across individuals, the brain uses the same standard categories to classify words — helping us to turn sound into sense.
The study is based on words only in English. But it’s a step along the way to working out how the brain stores words in its language library, says neurosurgeon Ziv Williams at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. By mapping the overlapping sets of brain cells that respond to various words, he says, “we can try to start building a thesaurus of meaning”.
The brain area called the auditory cortex processes the sound of a word as it enters the ear. But it is the brain’s prefrontal cortex, a region where higher-order brain activity takes place, that works out a word’s ‘semantic meaning’ — its essence or gist.
