Take a Peek Inside the Brain's Filing Cabinet, University of California, Berkeley (CAL) Study

OUR brains are master organisers, able to make sense of the constant stream of visual information we encounter every day. A new map of the brain gives some insight into how it does this. Recent studies have suggested that the brain organises the things we see into categories, such as animals or faces (Nature Neuroscience, doi.org/fvdm99). To determine how this categorisation works, Jack Gallant at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues identified the 1705 most commonly used nouns and verbs in the English language. They then showed video clips of these objects and actions to four people as each lay in an fMRI scanner, and recorded the brain responses.

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