Sentences show up as predictable patterns in your brain

A new computer model can predict brain activity for a sentence such as, “The family played at the beach,” even though it has never seen that specific sentence before.

“We found that we can predict brain activity patterns—not perfectly [on average 70% correct], but significantly better than chance,” says Andrew Anderson, a research fellow at the University of Rochester, who led the study.

“We wanted to know if given a whole sentence, can we filter out what the brain’s representation of a word is.”


The team collected data from brain scans taken with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from 14 participants as they silently read 240 unique sentences.



The study is published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

brain maps
These brain maps show how accurately the model predicted patterns for new sentences. The brighter the area, the higher the accuracy. (Credit: Andrew Anderson and Xixi Wang/ University of Rochester)




65 attributes of the word ‘coffee’

“Coffee has a color, smell, you can drink it—coffee makes you feel good—it has sensory, emotional, and social aspects,” says senior author Rajeev Raizada, assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences. “So we built upon a model created by Jeffrey Binder at the Medical College of Wisconsin, a coauthor on the paper, and surveyed people to tell us about the sensory, emotional, social and other aspects for a set of words.



This is what’s going on in your brain when you read



The model captures a wider breadth of experience than previous semantic models, says Anderson, “which made it easier to interpret the relationship between the predictive model and brain activity patterns.”


The researchers says the study opens a new set of questions toward understanding how meaning is represented in the brain.



Source: University of Rochester

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