I want to make sense of this famous visualization that maps words in the English language to patches in the brain’s cortex – https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00069-1
I thought the cortex has specialized regions for motor control, processing audio (auditory lobe), processing vision (occipital lobe), etc.
But this study seems to suggest that the cortex is a general mass of neural tissue that can store arbitrary semantic meaning throughout it.
How is this possible?
In: Biology
The idea that we have “specialized regions” is a textbook heuristic aimed at making things easy to comprehend for intro students. If you actually dive into cognitive psychology / neuroscience, you will find out that our brains are much more domain general than specific! Yes, certain regions handle certain types of information due to wiring and brain architecture, but it doesn’t mean that is the one and only thing they do. For example, Broca’s area seems to be a general sequencer rather than a speech producing one, but you can’t have the latter if the former doesn’t work. Another example – Olfactory cortex “outsources” error detection and prediction to the visual cortex, be able it itself doesn’t have enough computing power. Hope that helps!
I think you are misinterpreting the study.
I don’t know if you are able to access the (https://youtu.be/k61nJkx5aDQ?feature=shared) associated with the study, but it states at one point that the words activate brain regions associated with known functions of the brain already.
For example, hearing the word “run” might activate the motor cortex. The word “stripe” activates words closer to the visual cortex.
This does not mean that each specific associated part is interpreting the meaning of the word itself, but that it is experiencing increased electrical activity in response to hearing the word.
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