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Scientists say they have made an atlas of where words' meanings are located in the brain. The map shows that words are represented in different regions throughout the brain's outer layer. Moreover, the brains of different people map language in the same way: words with related meanings lit up similar parts of the brain. Words meanings could pop up in different places simultaneously. Hearing the word "top" caused regions associated with clothing and appearances to light up. But "top" could also stimulate a region associated with words related to numbers and measurements. UC Berkeley neuroscientist, Jack Gallant, who authored the study, says the findings contradict two beliefs nonscientists commonly have about the brain. First, that only the left hemisphere handles language. Second, that the brain has localized regions which handle specific tasks. Contrary to those ideas, he says, language and meaning are distributed. "It's not that there's one brain area and one function," he says. But for Gallant, the real surprise is that the meanings of words triggered the same brain regions across multiple people in his study.

Scientists say they have made an atlas of where words' meanings are located in the brain. The map shows that words are represented in different regions throughout the brain's outer layer. Moreover, the brains of different people map language in the same way.

The recent advent of brain-mapping technology-which allows doctors to create a precise digital replica of a person's brain cartography--has made more surgeons comfortable with the concept of keeping patients awake while they operate. This article profiles a woman, Brittany Capone, who's having open-brain surgery to remove a tumor that's dangerously close to a region in the brain that controls speech and the ability to comprehend language. By doing the operation while she is awake and speaking, her surgeon, Dr. Philip Gutin, can figure out exactly where the offending growth ends and the area of the brain called the Wernicke's center begins. This way, Gutin can see how close he can cut without permanently affecting his patient's ability to talk. What neurosurgeons are learning through mapping and documenting their experiences is also informing general knowledge about where brain structures are located and the slightly different positions they can take in different people.

Keeping in touch is no longer about face to face, but instead screen to screen, highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day. Social media has become second nature -- but what impact is this having on our brain? "In a recent study, researchers at the UCLA brain mapping center used an fMRI scanner to image the brains of 32 teenagers as they used a bespoke social media app resembling Instagram. By watching the activity inside different regions of the brain as the teens used the app, the team found certain regions became activated by "likes", with the brain's reward center becoming especially active." This article goes into depth on how social media like instagram is changing our brain. It shows us what parts of our brain are getting stimulated when we use social media! It also talks about peer influence, social learning, and reward circuitry.

An upcoming and new study shows where language happens in your brain. Scientists have used brain scanning methods to create a virtual "map" showing where words are encoded in our brains.

This experiment dealt with patients who have Aphasia (an impairment of language due to a stroke or brain injury) and mapped out the brain to see what areas of the brain are affected and how their brains differ.

Researchers from King's College London Institute of Psychiatry, in collaboration with Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the University of Barcelona, mapped the neural pathways involved in word learning among humans. They found that the arcuate fasciculus, a collection of nerve fibres connecting auditory regions at the temporal lobe with the motor area located at the frontal lobe in the left hemisphere of the brain, allows the 'sound' of a word to be connected to the regions responsible for its articulation. Differences in the development of these auditory-motor connections may explain differences in people's ability to learn words. Researchers used diffusion tensor imaging to image the structure of the brain before a word learning task and functional MRI, to detect the regions in the brain that were most active during the task. They found a strong relationship between the ability to remember words and the structure of arcuate fasciculus, which connects two brain areas: the territory of Wernicke, related to auditory language decoding, and Broca's area, which coordinates the movements associated with speech and the language processing. In participants able to learn words more successfully their arcuate fasciculus was more myelinated i.e. the nervous tissue facilitated faster conduction of the electrical signal. In addition the activity between the two regions was more co-ordinated in these participants. Dr Catani concludes, "Now we understand that this is how we learn new words, our concern is that children will have less vocabulary as much of their interaction is via screen, text and email rather than using their external prosthetic memory. This research reinforces the need for us to maintain the oral tradition of talking to our children."

'By studying language in people with aphasia, we can try to accomplish two goals at once: we can improve our clinical understanding of aphasia and get new insights into how language is organized in the mind and brain,' said Daniel Mirman, Professor of Psychology at Drexel University. Mirman is lead author of a new study which examined data from 99 people who had persistent language impairments after a left-hemisphere stroke. In the first part of the study, the researchers collected 17 measures of cognitive and language performance and used a statistical technique to find the common elements that underlie performance on multiple measures. Researchers found that spoken language impairments vary along four dimensions or factors: 1. Semantic Recognition: difficulty recognizing the meaning or relationship of concepts, such as matching related pictures or matching words to associated pictures. 2. Speech Recognition: difficulty with fine-grained speech perception, such as telling "ba" and "da" apart or determining whether two words rhyme. 3. Speech Production: difficulty planning and executing speech actions, such as repeating real and made-up words or the tendency to make speech errors like saying "girappe" for "giraffe." 4. Semantic Errors: making semantic speech errors, such as saying "zebra" instead of "giraffe," regardless of performance on other tasks that involved processing meaning. In the second part of the study, researchers mapped the areas of the brain associated with each of the four dimensions identified above.

interactive brain map

Since his birth 33 years ago, Jonathan Keleher has been living without a cerebellum, a structure that usually contains about half the brain's neurons. Besides playing a vital role in balance and fine motor control, the cerebellum is also actively involved in higher functions, like using language, reading maps and planning. Emotional complexity is a challenge for Jonathan, says his sister, Sarah Napoline. She says her brother is a great listener, but isn't introspective. "He doesn't really get into this deeper level of conversation that builds strong relationships, things that would be the foundation for a romantic relationship or deep enduring friendships," she says. Jonathan also needed to be taught a lot of things that people with a cerebellum learn automatically, Sarah says: how to speak clearly, how to behave in social situations and how to show emotion. Yet Jonathan is now able to do all of those things. He's done it by training other areas of his brain to do the jobs usually done by the cerebellum.

People are capable of learning more than one language at a young age. Bilingual people use a different part of their brain. Bilingual people are also better at various different test than people who speak just one language.

Systems Neuroscience Philadelphia, PA (Scicasts) - The exchange of words, speaking and listening in conversation, may seem unremarkable for most people, but communicating with others is a challenge for people who have aphasia, an impairment of language that often happens after stroke or other brain injury.

One significant concern that pilots have about cockpit auditory warnings is that the signals presently used lack a sense of priority. The relationship between auditory warning sound parameters and perceived urgency is, therefore, an important topic of enquiry in aviation psychology. The present investigation examined the relationship among subjective assessments of urgency, reaction time, and brainwave activity with three auditory warning signals. Subjects performed a tracking task involving automated and manual conditions, and were presented with auditory warnings having various levels of perceived and situational urgency. Subjective assessments revealed that subjects were able to rank warnings on an urgency scale, but rankings were altered after warnings were mapped to a situational urgency scale. Reaction times differed between automated and manual tracking task conditions, and physiological data showed attentional differences in response to perceived and situational warning urgency levels. This study shows that the use of physiological measures sensitive to attention and arousal, in conjunction with behavioural and subjective measures, may lead to the design of auditory warnings that produce a sense of urgency in an operator that matches the urgency of the situation.

While this article is directed towards teachers, students can leverage this information to their advantage. Employ the following five strategies to aid retention: 1. Teach a friend. When students explain what they've learned to peers, fading memories are reactivated, strengthened, and consolidated. This strategy not only increases retention but also encourages active learning (Sekeres et al., 2016). 2. The spacing effect: Instead of covering a topic and then moving on, revisit key ideas throughout the school year. Research shows that students perform better academically when given multiple opportunities to review learned material. For example, teachers can quickly incorporate a brief review of what was covered several weeks earlier into ongoing lessons, or use homework to re-expose students to previous concepts (Carpenter et al., 2012; Kang, 2016). 3. Frequent practice tests: Akin to regularly reviewing material, giving frequent practice tests can boost long-term retention and, as a bonus, help protect against stress, which often impairs memory performance. Breaking down one large high-stakes test into smaller tests over several months is an effective approach (Adesope, Trevisan, & Sundararajan, 2017; Butler, 2010; Karpicke, 2016). 4. Interleave concepts: Instead of grouping similar problems together, mix them up. Solving problems involves identifying the correct strategy to use and then executing the strategy. When similar problems are grouped together, students don't have to think about what strategies to use-they automatically apply the same solution over and over. Interleaving forces students to think on their feet, and encodes learning more deeply (Rohrer, 2012; Rohrer, Dedrick, & Stershic, 2015). 5. Combine text with images: It's often easier to remember information that's been presented in different ways, especially if visual aids can help organize information. For example, pairing a list of countries occupied by German forces during World War II wi

This article talks about the ASL-LEX database that four scientists created. The map of signs is meant to represent a mental lexicon and is allowing them to examine how signs are organized in the human mind. The article explains that signs may rhyme in a visual way even though the words do not, which causes the brain to relate groups of signs together. One pattern that was noticed is that the more commonly used signs tend to be simpler and shorter than the rare ones, which is comparable to spoken language. They also found that common signs are more likely to be in clusters of visually similar words, while rare signs are more isolated.