Researchers used fMRI to create semantic maps of the brain while people listened to “The Moth Radio Hour.” ©ALEXANDER HUTH/THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIATo better understand how the brain processes language, researchers from the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and their colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map the brains of people listening to a storytelling podcast. Using the resulting maps, the team could accurately predict the study participant’s neural responses to hearing new stories. And these responses were surprisingly consistent across individuals, according to the team’s study, published today (April 27) in Nature.
“This paper nicely illustrates both the potential power and limitations of purely data-driven methods for evaluating functional brain-imaging data,” Alex Martin, chief of cognitive neuropsychology at the National Institute of Mental Health, who was not involved in the work, wrote in an email to The Scientist. “What is unclear,” he continued, “is whether any new organizational principles emerge from these data, [and] how do we validate these findings?”
Previous neuroimaging studies of how the brain interprets speech have revealed a group of brain areas called the semantic system that appears to represent the meaning of language. Traditionally, these studies have focused on a single, narrow question or hypothesis about how the brain represents word or sentence meanings.
To map the brain’s semantic representation more broadly, ...
