Speaking of Science

A brand new atlas

shows where different
ideas live in our brains
By Sarah Kaplan April 28

By Sarah Kaplan April 28

A map of concepts in the right cerebral hemisphere. (Alexander Huth)

A man on the radio is talking about what it was like to come out to his family
as gay.

The sound of his voice streams into the ear of the listener and vibrates in the
snail shell-shaped cavity of her cochlea. The sounds are translated into electric
impulses, which shoot along her nerves into her auditory cortex. Language
processing centers start parsing the story for syllables, words, rhythm and
syntax. And somehow, they're able to figure out what it all means.

Inside the MRI machine, the listener's brain is aglow with activity.
For the first time, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have
mapped that activity, determining where in the brain certain concepts
family, numbers, texture and touch are processed and understood. The
result of their work, which was published this week in the journal Nature, is an
entirely new kind of tool for neuroscientists. Researcher Jack Gallant, a
psychology professor at Berkeley, calls it a "semantic atlas" an atlas of ideas.
[Scientists open the black box of schizophrenia with dramatic genetic
discovery]
He hopes neuroscientists will use it the way navigators use a globe. It can't tell
them anything about brain function on its own, but it can guide their
exploration. "It's a tool that you can use to answer other questions," he said.

Other researchers, or anyone else who is interested, will soon be able to look
at the atlas online. (A rough version is up now, but it only shows the results of
one brain scan and requires a pretty fast computer). It's based on scans of the
brains of seven Berkeley graduate students and post-docs as they listened to
two hours worth of stories from the public radio program "The Moth Radio
Hour" stories about love, faith, abuse, regret, gender identity, exotic
dancing and Yankees baseball, among other things.
Gallant and his colleagues matched spikes in activity in each brain to the
words being uttered, and found that words associated with
related ideas tended to elicit similar responses. For example, an area that lit
up in response to "pregnant" was adjacent to the one stimulated by "house,"
suggesting that a broader notion family was focused there. Natural
language processing software let the researchers translate the stories into
groups concepts, then map those concepts onto each of the seven brains.
Intriguingly, all seven of the maps were strikingly similar.

Then Gallant's team used a statistical tool of their own invention to identify
functional areas the students all had in common (essentially, a more
sophisticated version of taking an average) and create a more general model.
When they tested that model on a story none of the subjects had heard yet, it
turned out to be a fairly good predictor of how they would respond.

With just seven subjects, the study is a lot smaller than is considered reliable
in neuroscience (or pretty much any scientific field, for that matter).
Traditionally, a bigger sample size indicates a more accurate result; a poll of
100,000 people is generally more reliable than one that questions just 10,
because there's less chance of random variations and mistakes skewing the
average result. A larger sample size is also more likely to accurately represent
humanity as a whole.

[Turkish people are talking with whistles, and its challenging how we think
the brain works]
But it's harder to collect a lot of information from your subjects as your sample
size gets larger running his experiment on 700 or even 70 subjects instead
of seven would have taken an extraordinary amount of time and limited how
many stories and concepts Gallant could examine. Instead, he opted to use
just a few subjects to develop his model map of the brain, and then tested that
model on a new story to see if it held up. He argues that this process of proving
the model's accuracy is just as good a test of the validity of his results. And
he'll continue bumping up the sample size as well, adding results of future
brain scans to refine his atlas further.

For now, all it takes is a quick glance at the atlas to see that the semantic
system of the brain is still an uncharted jungle. Meaning isn't processed in
specific centers so much as within vast, intricate networks. Social concepts, for
example, which are coded in red on the atlas, are splashed across both
hemispheres of the brain.
That's something of a surprise for neuroscientists, who have traditionally
believed that language was the purview of the left brain the side that deals
with logic, computation and facts. Then again, most neuroscience studies look
at responses to specific words and sounds, not broad concepts.

It may be true that word processing and production happen in the left brain,
Gallant said, but the search for meaning seems to require the entire organ.

"This doesn't mean that localization is false," he said. "It's just that the brain is
really, really complicated."

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Gallant believes that various parts of the brain are marshaled into action to
analyze ideas. For example, a mention of "family" might stimulate memories
of the listener's own family from one sector and an abstract ideal of family
from another.

"The brain is an efficient organ, so presumably we have so many different

representations because they are necessary," Gallant said. The question is:
Why?

That's just one of the unsolved puzzles provoked by Gallant's study. Another is
why the seven brain maps generated from the seven subjects looked so much
like one another. This may be a function of the fact that the subjects were so
similar all were successful, English-speaking students at the same school.
Perhaps, if Gallant mapped concepts in the brain of an artist in Brazil or a
toddler in Japan, the results would look different. Or perhaps they would look
like the initial seven, indicating that the semantic systems of diverse human
brains share a fundamental architectural plan the way apartments in the
same building can have the same layout but be filled with wildly different
furniture.

These questions are studies waiting to happen, Gallant said. And now he has a
road map for running them.