Finding out exactly how the brain makes meaning from words could fuel experiments for years. She wants to include participants who don’t speak English, speak multiple languages or have auditory processing disorders or dyslexia.

More Work Aheadĭeniz wants to take the experiment even further by testing on a broader range of subjects. Their work is part of a broader effort to understand which regions of our brains help give meaning to certain types of words. In fact, the brain maps for both auditory and visual input they created from the data looked nearly identical. The subject’s brains were creating meaning from the words in the same way, regardless if they were listening or reading. It was a finding that surprised Fatma Deniz, a postdoctoral researcher at the Gallant Lab and lead author of the study.

One section responded to terms like “father,” “refused,” and “remarried” - social words that describe dramatic events, people or time.īut the most recent study, which compared brains when they were listening and reading, showed that words tend to activate the same brain regions with the same intensity, regardless of input. In 2016, researchers at the Gallant Lab published their first interactive map of a person’s brain after they listened to two hours of stories from “The Moth.” It’s a vibrant, rainbow-hued diagram of a brain divided into about 60,000 parts, called voxels.Ĭoding and analyzing the data in each voxel helped researchers visualize which regions of the brain process certain kinds of words. It’s adding to our understanding of how our brains give semantic meaning to the squiggly letters and bursts of sound that make up our communication. Looking at the brain scans and data analysis, the researchers saw that the stories stimulated the same cognitive and emotional areas, regardless of their medium.

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