Holistically Tuned - The Brain Sees Words As Pictures, Not A Series Of Letters
Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - 17:20
in Psychology & Sociology
When we look at a known word, our brain sees it more like a picture than a series of letters needing to be processed, according to a new paper in the Journal of Neuroscience.Neurons respond differently to real words, such as turf, than to nonsense words, such as turt, showing that a small area of the brain is "holistically tuned" to recognize complete words, says the study's senior author, Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD, who leads the Georgetown University Medical Center Laboratory for Computational Cognitive Neuroscience. The brain learns words quickly by tuning neurons to respond to a complete word, not parts of it. read more