Answered Essential Issues
Q: What insights into the brain’s processing of substances were found in the study?
A: It was discovered that different brain regions are tuned to practice sand and water differently.
Q: Why is it important to make this difference?
A: It enables the mind to make decisions based on how different kinds of materials act, such as scooping a glass or grabbing a device.
Q: How was this tested?
A: Participants who watched videos of particles moving in a fluid showed different detection patterns in brain scans.
Summary: A recent study demonstrates that our brains use specialized circuits in the visual cortex to separate” stuff” like water and sand from” things” like balls and tools. Different regions of the dorsal and lateral visual pathways were identified by functional MRI scans that were more sensitive to material fluidity or rigidity.
This separation may aid in the brain’s ability to create how to actually interact with various materials, such as those that are to be grasped, pour, scooped, or avoided. According to the experts, our brains may be running various physics simulations for fluids and solids in a similar way to a video game website.
Important Information
- Material Processing Split: Which areas of the brain are better at handling particles than liquids like waters or dust?
- Behavior-Based Design: This neurological difference may influence how we choose to interact with various components.
- Simulation of Solids and Fluids: This is consistent with the rationale of video game science machines.
Origin: MIT
Imagine a game bouncing up a flight of stairs. Now consider a cascade of waters descending those same steps. It turns out that your mind has different locations to process sensory information about each different type of physical matter because the game and the ocean behave very different.
According to a new study from MIT neuroscientists, parts of the brain’s visual cortex respond more favorably when you look at rigid or deformable things like a bouncing ball. When looking at” stuff,” which is a liquid or granular substance like sand, other brain regions are more activated.
According to the researchers, this distinction, which has never been made in the brain before, may aid in the brain’s ability to organize its interactions with various kinds of physical materials.  ,
You interact with fluid or gooey material in a different way than you do with a rigid object, according to the saying. The Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, and senior author of the study, Nancy Kanwisher, the senior author of the study, says that while with a rigid object, you might pick it up or grasp it, you might have to use a tool to deal with it.
Vivian Paulun, a postdoc at MIT and who will be joining the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the fall, is the lead author of the paper, which is published today in the journal , Current Biology. The study’s authors are also RT Pramod, an MIT postdoc, and Josh Tenenbaum, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences.
Stuff versus things
Regions in the brain’s ventral visual pathway are involved in recognizing shapes of 3D objects, including an area known as the lateral occipital complex ( LOC), according to decades of brain imaging research, including early work by Kanwisher.
The frontoparietal physics network ( FPN), a region of the brain’s dorsal visual pathway, analyzes material’s physical properties, such as stability and mass.
The majority of these studies were conducted with solid objects, or” things,” despite scientists having learned a lot about how these pathways respond to various features of objects.
No one has questioned how we interpret” stuff,” which includes liquids or sand, honey, water, and various gooey things. And so we made the decision to study that,” Paulun says.
These ooey substances have a very different behavior from solids. They typically require containers and tools like spoons and spoons to interact with them because they flow rather than bounce. The researchers were curious to find out if these physical characteristics might require the brain to work on specific areas of interpretation.
More than 100 video clips that depict various kinds of things or objects interfering with the physical environment were used by Paulun to explore how the brain processes these materials.
The materials could be seen sliding or stumbling onto another object, or bouncing or flowing down a set of stairs in these videos.  ,
The researchers scanned the people’s visual cortex using functional magnetic resonance imaging ( fMRI ) as they watched the videos. They discovered that both the LOC and the FPN have different” things” and” stuff” responses, but that each pathway has distinct subregions that are more sensitive to one or the other.
According to Paulun, “both the ventral and the dorsal visual pathway appear to have this subdivision, with one responding more strongly to” things” and the other responding more strongly to” things,”” respectively. ” Nobody has asked that before, so we haven’t seen this before.”
physical co-operation
The findings point to the possibility that the brain may have a variety of ways to represent these two types of material, similar to the artificial physics engines used to create video game graphics. Fluids are typically represented as sets of particles that can be rearranged in a 3D object as a mesh, while fluids are typically represented as meshes.  ,
The brain may have separate computations for representing and simulating” things” and” things,” according to the intriguing hypothesis that can be drawn from this. And that will be put to the test in the near future,” Paulun claims.
The researchers also make the hypothesis that these regions may have evolved to aid in the brain’s understanding crucial distinctions, which enable it to determine how to interact with the physical world.
The researchers want to find out more about whether the areas responsible for processing rigid objects are also active when a brain circuit responsible for organizing ideas to grasp objects is active.  ,
Additionally, they want to know whether any of the FPN’s components are related to the processing of more particular characteristics of materials, such as the object’s bounciness or viscosity. And they intend to study how changes in the shape of deformable and liquid substances are reflected in the LOC.
Funding:
The Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines received funding from the German Research Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation.  ,
About this news from a study on visual neuroscience
Author: Sarah McDonnell
Source: MIT
Contact: Sarah McDonnell – MIT
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Open access to original research.
The human brain’s dissociable cortical regions represent both the things and the stuff, according to Nancy Kanwisher and others. Current Biology
Abstract
In the human brain, things and things are represented by dissociable cortical regions.
Prior research has identified areas of the human brain that are related to the physical properties and interactions of objects ( lateral occipital complex]LOC] ) and their physical properties ( frontoparietal physics network [FPN] ).
However, this work has essentially only examined how these regions respond to rigid objects.
Similar to the” stuff” of deformable or nonsolid substances, such as liquids like water or honey and granular materials like sand or snow, are of equal importance in daily life, but they have different physical characteristics and require different actions.
Little is known about the brain’s fundamental mechanisms for perception.
Here, we use functional MRI ( fMRI ) to scan participants while they watch videos of both liquid and granular materials ( stuff ) and rigid and non-rigid objects ( “things” ).
Within both the ventral and dorsal visual pathways, there are two dissociations between how things and things are processed.
These findings point to the existence of distinct mental algorithms when we perceive things and things, just as they do in artificial physics engines.
