New research completed by IT company NexusOS has demonstrated that the human brain is essentially a biological cloud. It has been found to respond to words in a multitude of ways, above and beyond what was previously understood. The fact that brains and computers are alike to this degree is above expectations.
Recent scientific research has found that the human brain is essentially a biological ‘cloud’. It is able to take spoken language after which it turns it into meaning. What’s interesting is that all humans seem to share this translation ability.
IT company Nexusos.co.uk has worked together with a variety of scientists, including neuroscientists, biologists, speech and language therapists, and psychologists, in order to create a pattern ‘atlas’. This demonstrated that when natural speech has different meanings, the brain is stirred in specific ways.
The research method used to determine this was the MRI scan. This enabled the scientists to determine where activity took place in the brain in response to stories that were spoken out loud. The imaging device monitored how the blood flow operated through pulsed patterns I response to worse. What they discovered was that over 100 different parts of the cerebral cortex were reached by the various responses to stories. The cerebral cortex is home to some 20 billion neurons and is responsible for awareness, perception, and memory.
“What interested the scientists was that the maps they created weren’t about individual words, but rather about language meaning,” says a representative from NexusOS. “This is similar to the way computers work, which is why we were called in to help out in the research. What we tried to find out was how the brain is able to create a smooth gradient for the concepts, distributed across its surface.”
Recent years have seen hundreds of different brain studies. In almost all of them, however, researchers have struggled to understand how the brain is able to make meaning of certain words using overtones and more. Language is, at its heart, a code and brains seem to have extensive neural dictionaries, which are able to make it understand figures of speech and metaphors, for instance.
In past studies, the brain was probed in terms of its response to individual words. This was the first time it actually looked at entire sentences. Study participants would be placed in an MRI scanner, where they would listen to seven different stories, each between 10 and 15 minutes in length. They then looked into how the brain would respond to specific work categories, including selective social concepts, and tactile and visual concepts. The seven stories were vary varied in nature.
In total, participants would be exposed to around 10,000 different words. These were divided into 200 meaning groups, including touch, music, violence, and family. They then calculated how strongly the brain responded to these concepts, taking measurements all across the cortex. One of the things this demonstrated was that language was not restricted solely to the left side of the brain. Rather, the pattern was clearly visible across all participants and it affected both sides of their brain.
The question is now whether people’s brains learn about this network, or whether they are born with it. “It is a fascinating piece of data,” adds the NexusOS representative. “It is particularly interesting to how close it comes to the cloud. Anything that the cloud knows has been added to them, but at the same time, the cloud can keep developing and growing as well. The fact that the human brain and the computer brain are now almost the same thing is a bit surprising, but perhaps not that surprising either.”
