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The brain turns words into pictures

04.04.2015

When learning new words, our brain shifts from reading letters to perceiving the word as a single visual image, researchers from Georgetown University came to such conclusions. Their experiment involved 25 people who were asked to learn a set of specially made up nonsense words. In parallel, with the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging, the work of the brain was monitored. It turned out that as the proposed verbal nonsense was learned, the activity of neurons changed. That is, at first they perceived the new word as something incomprehensible, consisting of separate characters, but then it became familiar, and was included in the dictionary as a single "picture".

For a long time it was believed that text recognition in the neural apparatus occurs by letter. At first glance, this is how it should be, because words consist of letters, and we ourselves learn to read, analyzing what is written letter by letter. However, in 2009, in the journal Neuron, Maximilian Riesenhuber and his colleagues published an article describing the activity of the region of the left visual cortex, which recognizes words immediately and completely. (By the way, the symmetrical area in the visual cortex on the right is responsible for face recognition.) Of course, the question immediately arose of how the "visual dictionary" is formed. This is where the invented words were needed, which the participants in the new experiment had to learn.

As a result, neuroscientists were able to see how visual neurons gradually tune in to a new vision of the text, how the transition from reading by letter to recognizing the word as a whole takes place. Obviously, this speeds up and facilitates reading - as well as recognizing faces as a whole, and not by individual features, helps to quickly recognize another person and facilitates communication.

New data may help those people who have neurological problems with reading. It happens that the brain is simply not able to learn words by the usual spelling method, like a sequence of letters. And then, perhaps, a method in which the emphasis would not be on letters, but on the word as a single visual image, would come in very handy. Perhaps, by stimulating the corresponding zone of the visual cortex, we can achieve great success in learning foreign languages. True, in addition to writing, you also need to know the pronunciation of words, but for this you already need to turn to other parts of the brain - those that are responsible for the perception and analysis of speech sounds.

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