Words On The Brain: A Semantic Map of the Cortex

In a new Nature paper, Berkely neuroscientists Alexander G. Huth and colleagues present a 'semantic atlas' of the human brain. Huth et al. have mapped which brain areas respond to words, according to the semantics (meanings) of each word. It turns out that these maps are highly similar across individuals - which could have implications for 'mind reading' technology. Huth et al. recorded brain activity with fMRI while seven volunteers listened to over two hours of audio narrative (taken from the award winning 'Moth Radio Hour' series.) The purpose of this was to determine the pattern of neural responses associated with different words. In total, there were over 10,470 English words in the Moth narratives. To make it feasible to analyse these, Huth et al. first calculated the co-occurrence between each word and 985 common English words, which served as semantic 'markers'. For instance, a word which has a high ...