Summary: A new research reveals that certain mental cells, known as” idea cells”, in the brain record pronouns to reference them with the right people in a statement. These cells respond to nouns like “he” or” she” that refer to them as well as a person’s name or picture, according to experts.
The research demonstrates how the brain, which is a crucial component of recollection and understanding, helps us understand speech by connecting adjectives to their related nouns. These results provide fresh insights into how the brain organizes and operations information.
Important Information:
- Mind” idea cells” website pronouns like “he” or” she” to the right people.
- The brain helps connect adjectives to nouns, aiding recollection and comprehension.
- This study provides fresh insights into how the brain processes speech.
Origin: KNAW
Read the following word:” Donald Trump and Kamala Harris walked into the table, she sat along at a stand”. We are all already aware that Kamala, never Donald, was the one who sat at the table. Adjectives like” she” help us to understand vocabulary, but adjectives you have multiple meanings.
We are able to identify the word when the environment allows. But how do we become so adept at this, and how does our brains connect adjectives to their verbs?
To answer this question, an international group of researchers, doctors, and psychiatrists joined forces. Along with their coworkers, Doris Dijksterhuis and Matthew Self from Pieter Roelfsema’s group examined the head activity of epilepsy people.
As part of their treatment, these people were implanted with level wires in their brain, a mind neighborhood involved in learning and storage. The analysis team benefited from this by running further testing with them.
” We can monitor the activity of individual mental cells in the brain while the patient performs a task,” says Matthew Self. In the brain, there are tissues that respond to a particular individual, so-called” idea cells”.
” A well-known case is the” Jennifer Aniston body,” which becomes effective when you see a picture of Jennifer Aniston, hear her name or read the words” Jennifer Aniston”. We wondered if these cells even become engaged when you only read a word, like’ he’ or’ she’. Can the word be linked to the correct person using these cell?
Shrek mobile
Doris Dijksterhuis:” To test this, we first showed the clients some images until we found a body that responded to one particular picture. For instance, we found a battery that responded to an picture of’ Shrek’ but not to different pictures. This body is referred to as a” Shrek idea cell.” When people after later read the phrase” Shrek and Fiona were having supper. He poured out some wines”. the’ Shrek ‘ cell truly responded to the term” Shrek”, but also to the pronoun ‘ He.’
This is intriguing because a word may mean something completely different in a different phrase.
For example, in the sentence ‘Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were having dinner. He poured out some wine,’ the same pronoun, ‘He’, refers to Donald Trump, and therefore the Shrek mobile will not react. Individual hippocampal cells track who the pronoun refers to in a dynamic, flexible way.”
Self:” We asked the participants to name the person who carried out the action at the end of each sentence. Based on the individual concept cells ‘ activity, we could predict whether the patients would respond in the appropriate way.
” To make it a bit more challenging, we also added some trick questions, with two people of the same gender:” Jennifer Aniston and Kamala Harris walked into a bar. She sat at the table. The patient had to choose who carried out the action.
We found that patients tended to pick the person with the highest hippocampus activity at the start of the sentence. This could be caused by chance fluctuations in activity on a trial-by-test basis or a person’s internal preference for one of the two characters in the sentence.
The bigger picture
Dijksterhuis:” The hippocampus is crucial for learning and memory, but it is not clear how the hippocampus functions in the interaction between memory and language. How do we remember what we’ve read?
You have a variety of ideas that combine to form the narrative when you consider something you’ve read. We can identify who carried out what in the story and how our memory is shaped by the cells in our hippocampus. Ultimately, we want to know how an entire memory is formed and represented in the brain”.
The fact that this group of patients has given their consent to be a part of our research is very important. It is impossible to study these processes in animals because we can only very rarely observe how active single brain cells are in people who are reading. When we get the chance, we try to get as much out of it as possible”.
About this news about neuroscience research and language
Author: Eline Feenstra
Source: KNAW
Contact: Eline Feenstra – KNAW
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
By Matthew Self and colleagues,” In human hippocampal neurons, pronouns reactivate conceptual representations..” Science
Abstract
In human hippocampal neurons, pronouns reactivate conceptual representations.
Every new word helps to expand the evolving representation of meaning that has been accumulated over successive sentences and limits the number of words that follow during discourse comprehension.
To minimize repetition and utterance length, languages use pronouns, like the word” she”, to refer to nouns and phrases that were previously introduced. It is suggested that pronouns must activate the same neuronal representations as the nouns themselves in order to understand language.
During a reading task, we collected data from individual neurons in the human hippocampus. Cells that were selective to a particular noun were later reactivated by pronouns that refer to the cells ‘ preferred noun.
These results suggest that concept cells are a part of a rapid and dynamic semantic memory network that is created during language comprehension.
