New brain research shows that reading stories generates activity in the same regions of the brain for speakers of three different languages.


English, Farsi and Mandarin readers use the same parts of the brain to decode the deeper meaning of what they’re reading.
Credit: Morteza Dehghani, et a


Source: Something universal occurs in the brain when it processes stories, regardless of language

Date: October 5, 2017

Source: University of Southern California




“Even given these fundamental differences in language, which can be read in a different direction or contain a completely different alphabet altogether, there is something universal about what occurs in the brain at the point when we are processing narratives,” said Morteza Dehghani, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC.



Making sense of 20 million personal anecdotes



Using state-of-the-art machine learning and text-analysis techniques, and an analysis involving over 44 billion classifications, the researchers were able to “reverse engineer” the data from these brain scans to determine the story the reader was processing in each of the three languages. In effect, the neuroscientists were able to read the participants’ minds as they were reading.

The brain is not resting

In the case of each language, reading each story resulted in unique patterns of activations in the “default mode network” of the brain. This network engages interconnected brain regions such as the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, the inferior parietal lobe, the lateral temporal cortex and hippocampal formation.


“One of the biggest mysteries of neuroscience is how we create meaning out of the world. Stories are deep-rooted in the core of our nature and help us create this meaning,” said Jonas Kaplan, corresponding author at the Brain and Creativity Institute and an assistant professor of psychology at USC Dornsife.

Story Source:


Journal Reference:

  1. Morteza Dehghani, Reihane Boghrati, Kingson Man, Joe Hoover, Sarah I. Gimbel, Ashish Vaswani, Jason D. Zevin, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Andrew S. Gordon, Antonio Damasio, Jonas T. Kaplan. Decoding the neural representation of story meanings across languages. Human Brain Mapping, 2017; DOI: 10.1002/hbm.23814