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Thoughts are recognized and recorded

09.07.2012

A group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson have learned to read the words that appear in the human brain by deciphering the electrical signals emanating from it.

The scientists worked with volunteers with epilepsy who were waiting for brain surgery. Electrodes were implanted into the volunteers' brains, capable of receiving signals that cannot be felt from the outside. Volunteers were read 15 randomly selected words, after a minute they were asked to recall these words in the order in which they would remember them. It was found that a second before the volunteer remembered the next word, the brain gave out his electrical "signature".

Since the patient did not read, hear, or speak any words at the time of "remembering," the researchers concluded that the specific signal corresponding to the word was the result of the inner workings of brain neurons.

Surprisingly, the main point of this study was not only to "read" the words that arise in the volunteer's brain - the scientists wanted to understand by what principle he remembers them, in other words, how his associative memory is organized. That, the researchers say, will be the subject of their next experiments. They want to know what drives memory, what associations first of all cause the memory of a word - the size of an object, sound, color, taste, or some other quality.

“Spontaneous verbal memory,” says Michael Kayhana, one of the leading participants in the study, “is a unique human property. However, this aspect of human memory is very poorly understood today. To understand the role that language plays in the formation of a person’s thought, in his communications with other people , to figure out the essence of neural signals that determine the meaning of a particular word, to understand the mechanism that spontaneously calls them from memory - all this will bring us closer to the ever-elusive goal, to understanding how thoughts are formed in the human brain.

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