By listening to the brains of living people, scientists have created the previously high-ending map of the neurons, which encodes the meanings of different words 1 . The results indicate that the brain uses the same standard categories over individual way to classify words - which helps us to convert sound into meaning.

The study is only based on English words. But it is a step on the way to find out how the brain stores words in his language library, says Ziv Ziv Williams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. By the Overlapping groups map brain cells that react to different words , he says:" Can we try to build a dictionary of meanings ".

The work was published in Nature today.

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The brain area, which as Auditive Cortex is referred to, processes the sound of a word when it gets into the ear. But it is the pre -frontal cortex of the brain, a region in which activities take place at a higher level that works out the 'semantic meaning' of a word - its essence or core.

at an earlier research time this process was analyzed by of the blood flow in the brain were examined, which is a proxy for brain activity . This method made it possible for researchers who ...

  • Jamali, M. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/S41586-07643-2 (2024).
  • Tang, J., Lebel, A., Jain, S. & Huth, A. G. Nature Neurosci . 26 , 858–866 (2023).

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