| Using brain recordings to reconstruct aspects of an image or movie clip someone is viewing, a sound someone is hearing or even the text someone is reading. This is according to a new study by University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University scientists brings this work one step closer to actual mind reading by using brain recordings to infer the way people organize associations between words in their memories. |
The study was recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research results, and parallel findings begin to paint a portrait of the brain mechanisms underlying memory organization.
An intriguing feature of this portrait is that medial temporal lobe regions,including hippocampus, which do not appear to be strongly implicated in representing the semantic similarities among items, do appear to be critical for predicting how those similarities influence the organization of retrieval. Other regions, such as occipital cortex, do appear to represent similarities among studied items, but do not appear to be critical for the organization of retrieval.
Epilepsy patients who volunteered for the study while awaiting brain surgery had tiny electrodes implanted in their brains, which allowed researchers to precisely observe electrical signals that would not have been possible to measure outside the skull. While recording these electrical signals, the researchers asked the participants to study lists of 15 randomly chosen words and, a minute later, to repeat the words back in whichever order they came to mind.
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| Image Source: Manning et al. |
The researchers examined the brain recordings as the participants studied each word to home in on signals in the participant’ brains that reflected the meanings of the words. About a second before the participants recalled each word, these same “meaning signals” that were identified during the study phase were spontaneously reactivated in the participants’ brains.
Because the participants were not seeing, hearing or speaking any words at the times these patterns were reactivated, the researchers could be sure they were observing the neural signatures of the participants’ self-generated, internal thoughts.
The research was conducted by professor Michael J. Kahana of the Department of Psychology in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences and graduate student Jeremy R. Manning, then a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Group in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. They collaborated with other members of Kahana’s laboratory, as well as with research faculty at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
In an earlier study, Manning and Kahana used a similar technique to predict participants’ tendencies to organize learned information according to the time in which it was learned. Their new study adds to this research by elucidating the neural signature of organizing learned information by meaning.
“Each person’s brain patterns form a sort of ‘neural fingerprint’ that can be used to read out the ways they organize their memories through associations between words,” Manning said.
The techniques the researchers developed in this study could also be adapted to analyze many different ways of mentally organizing studied information.
“In addition to looking at memories organized by time, as in our previous study, or by meaning, as in our current study, one could use our technique to identify neural signatures of how individuals organize learned information according to appearance, size, texture, sound, taste, location or any other measurable property,” Manning said.
“Spontaneous verbal recall is a form of memory that is both pervasive in our lives and unique to the human species,” Kahana said. “Yet, this aspect of human memory is the least well understood in terms of brain mechanisms. Our data show a direct correspondence between patterns of brain activity and the meanings of individual words and show how this neural representation of meaning predicts the way in which one item cues another during spontaneous recall.
“Given the critical role of language in human thought and communication, identifying a neural representation that reflects the meanings of words as they are spontaneously recalled brings us one step closer to the elusive goal of mapping thoughts in the human brain.”
SOURCE KurzweilAI, University of Pennsylvania
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