What happens in the brain when we learn new words? Of unfamiliar letter sequences the word is gradually transformed into a single visual image.
When learning new words our brain shifts from reading letters to the perception of words as a single visual image – this is the conclusion reached by researchers from Georgetown University. In their experiment involved 25 people who were asked to learn a set of specially invented meaningless words. In parallel with functional magnetic resonance imaging watching the brain work. It turned out that as the proposed learning verbal nonsense has varied the activity of neurons. That is, at first they perceived a new word as something strange, consisting of individual characters, but then it became familiar, and were included in the dictionary of the single “picture”.
Photo © Losevsky Pavel / Photobank Lori.
For a long time it was believed that the recognition of text in the neural apparatus occurs by letter. At first glance, the way it should be, because the words are composed of letters, and we ourselves are learning to read, letter by letter, examining what is written. However, in 2009 in the journal Neuron , Riesenhuber Maximilian (Maximilian Riesenhuberand his colleagues published an article which described the activity area of the left visual cortex, recognizing the words immediately and entirely. (By the way, a symmetrical site in the right visual cortex responsible for facial recognition.) of Course, immediately the question arose, how a “visual dictionary”. Here need made-up words that had to teach the participants a new experiment.
As a result, neuroscientists have been able to see how visual neurons gradually tune into the new vision of the text as a transition from reading letters to recognize words as a whole. Obviously, this accelerates and facilitates reading and recognizing faces as a whole, not on individual traits, helps you quickly get to know the other person and facilitates communication. The results will be published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
New data can help those people who have a neurological problem with reading. It happens that the brain is simply not able to learn words common, spelling method, as the sequence of letters. And then, perhaps, came in very handy would be a method in which the emphasis was not on the letters, and the word as a single visual image. May be by stimulating the corresponding area of the visual cortex, we will be able to achieve greater success in learning foreign languages. However, in addition to writing, you have to know the pronunciation of the words, but it is already necessary to turn to other areas of the brain, to those who are responsible for the perception and analysis of speech sounds.
Author: Cyril Stasevich
Source: nkj.EN
See more: http://www.nkj.ru/news/26092/ (Science and life, the Brain turns words into pictures)
