scientists have Made a new Discovery About The Human Brain It is More like a Living Word Cloud that responds to the meaning of Words in more Ways than Ever thought Before wsj Science reporter Lee hoz joins US Now with the details Hi Lee This is very interesting so scientists measure The Effects Words have on our brains is that Right Yes One of the Miracles of the mind is that the words that You and I speak Out Loud you know Span that GF between us and they They provoke They evoke the same meanings in my Brain
and the same meanings in your Brain I mean How do we possibly do that extraordinary trick and hundreds of studies have Gone into trying to figure this out Most recently today a Group at the University of California Berkley has announced for the first time They constructed a comprehensive map not Of Words but The meanings in your Brain that Words evoke when we Speak them Now They did a very Clever to tease this out They had volunteers and a Brain scanner mag reson im and had those People Listen to autograph Stories nares actually That would been
recorded by People performing on the moth Radio hour Which appears on many public Radio Stations where you know People Stand Up Open m and they They Tell very Moving Stories about themselves In this Case The Stories Range from a fellow Who talked about recovering his childhood memories A Woman Who told her uh dealing with her self-esteem issues by becoming an Exotic Dancer um 7even 10 to 15 minute narrative While their brains were being scanned a Total In These Stories Of 10,000 Words and they very cleverly organized These Words into concepts and they were able by
Tracking The Blood Flow in The Brain as your neurons started to Pop in response here and Pop in response There um and They Made this map and What It tells US Two very interesting things um One is that previous to this We Kind of thought language was Just concentrated In One Part Of The Brain the left hemisphere What this shows is that actually meaning there's a broad landscape that encompass like the entire cerebral corex That's 20 Billion neurons and Most telling You and I Share this pattern so interesting so did this study also Track the
Emotional responses to These Words It did not and I very Clear about this it didn't Look at the sort of the the words themselves I mean in terms of phonetics or Sound or Emotional violence a Very Good Point No They tried to isolate um the meaning of The Word and partly was an artifact of How Fast The Machines can detect What happens in your Brain meaning is a little slower than um our ability to sort of work our Way through the actual phonetics of Spe Absolutely so did it Track the the meaning The response to
Individual Words or to the Compilation of of These Words in so as They became a Story um a Compilation Of Words but not as They became a Story but as They Kind of clustered in context They gathered These Words of the 10,000 Common English Words and It's important to Note that These were People Who were Native English speakers It's Not Clear that whether this would work the same in Japanese or Hindi or urdu although They suspect it probably is Universal They then collected These into 200 clusters of concepts Things like Touch or Col or Family
or violence and That's What They mapped and It's a Very intriguing thing They did Because it does get at this universality Of Our ability to share our knowledge and our experi through language Now They do acknowledge that it may be this Common pattern that You and I We have this We acquired a consequence shared cultural Experience and it May not hold up There a lot of work to be Done fascinating ST Lee thank you so much for telling us About It Always a Pleasure
