Group items tagged

It's commonly said that the Japanese language wields more food-describing onomatopoeia than any other. These adjectives capture the perceived sounds different foods make when we eat them. Saku saku! Fuwa fuwa! According to estimates, there are 445 such words in the Japanese language. "English has only slightly more than 130 words to describe the way foods feel in our mouths," reports Kendra Pierre-Louis in Popular Science's exploration of food texture in its latest issue themed around taste.

New brain imaging research at Emory University reveals that a region of the brain important for sensing texture through touch, the parietal operculum, is also activated when someone listens to a sentence with a textural metaphor. The same region is not activated when a similar sentence expressing the meaning of the metaphor is heard.

(This article was by my college friend, Quinn Eastman, who's a trained scientist and science writer for Emory University.) Listening to metaphors involving arms or legs loops in a region of the brain responsible for visual perception of those body parts, scientists have discovered. The finding, recently published in Brain & Language, is another example of how neuroscience studies are providing evidence for "grounded cognition" - the idea that comprehension of abstract concepts in the brain is built upon concrete experiences, a proposal whose history extends back millennia to Aristotle. When study participants heard sentences that included phrases such as "shoulder responsibility," "foot the bill" or "twist my arm", they tended to engage a region of the brain called the left extrastriate body area or EBA. The same level of activation was not seen when participants heard literal sentences containing phrases with a similar meaning, such as "take responsibility" or "pay the bill." The study included 12 right-handed, English-speaking people, and blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). "The EBA is part of the extrastriate visual cortex, and it was known to be involved in identifying body parts," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "We found that the metaphor selectivity of the EBA matches its visual selectivity." The EBA was not activated when study participants heard literal, non-metaphorical sentences describing body parts. "This suggests that deep semantic processing is needed to recruit the EBA, over and above routine use of the words for body parts," Sathian says. Sathian's research team had previously observed that metaphors involving the sense of touch, such as "a rough day", activate a region of the brain important for sensing texture. In addition, other researchers have shown t

This article discusses how the brain responds when hearing textural metaphors and literal sentences.

Every sense has its own "lexical field," a vast palette of dedicated descriptive words for colors, sounds, tastes, and textures. But smell? In English, there are only three dedicated smell words-stinky, fragrant, and musty-and the first two are more about the smeller's subjective experience than about the smelly thing itself. All of our other scent descriptors are really descriptions of sources: We say that things smell like cinnamon, or roses, or teen spirit, or napalm in the morning. The other senses don't need these linguistic workarounds. Some scientists have taken this as evidence that humans have relegated smell to the sensory sidelines, while vision has taken center-field. It's a B-list sense, deemed by Darwin to be "of extremely slight service." Others have suggested that smells are inherently indescribable, and that "olfactory abstraction is impossible." Yet some languages, like those of the Jahai people of Malaysia and the Maniq of Thailand use between 12 and 15 dedicated smell words: basic vocabulary not used for taste, or to describe general ideas of edibility. These two groups clearly show that odors, contrary to popular belief, are not universally ineffable; people from both cultures are also able to distinguish smells more accurately than Western cultures.

While there's an infinite number of stimuli in our daily lives, words that prime have been heavily researched. It has been shown that priming words can cause faster recognition or identification of something and also cause later actions that are similar to the ones read about. Because one cannot control the priming that occurs in "system 1" of the subconscious mind, people often incorrectly attribute their thoughts or actions to their own emotions, thoughts, and view points. Since many regions of the brain understand both social warmth as well as physical warmth, or both rough experiences as well rough texture, priming works without us realizing it because it creates neural linkages that only seem to connect subtly.