How does our brain process abstract ideas?
And does language and culture play a role?
Guess what? It’s Wednesday! And it’s June! And I am back with another newsletter full of things that I found interesting from the world of science and academia! I hope you are keeping physically and mentally healthy and if you’re not you can always reach out to me [= I appreciate you being here. If you found this newsletter online and want to get them right in your inbox you can subscribe using the cute button below! It’s free!
Last week we talked about chimps and their language. This week we’re sticking with language but we’re changing the focus to humans. Some time ago in the podcast, we talked with Dr. Evangelia Balatsou in the episode “How do we choose words” and we explored the way our brain chooses the words we use every day. In this newsletter, we’ll talk more about the brain and instead of the way it chooses the words, we’ll talk about the way the brain understands them. Does language play a role? What about culture? Let’s see…
How do you see brain activity when it’s thinking?
For this exciting new research, we travel to Carnegie Mellon University in the US. Ph.D. candidate Roberto Vargas is continuing the work started 30 years ago by Marcel Just. The work basically, involves using fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers in order to identify the different regions of the brain that get activated when it is faced with something concrete like sunny side up eggs, but also when it’s faced with something more abstract, like gravity.
While the above tests were part of earlier research, this time, (soon to be Dr.) Vargas wanted to examine the degree of commonality of brain activity across languages, and for that reason, the participants of the study were equally split between English speaking and Mandarin speaking. The test included 28 different concepts from seven categories:social, emotion, metaphysics, law, religiosity, mathematics, and science.
The volunteers would think about the concepts presented to them during the fMRI and between each prompt, they were asked to clear their minds by focusing on a shrinking blue ellipse for seven seconds. The researchers wanted to identify the different regions and compare between English speaking and Mandarin speaking. So what were the results?
Same-same… but different.
Sometimes results don’t show a huge difference that would make drawing bigger conclusions easier. In this case, the results showed that the infrastructure for connecting different regions of the brain that process these abstract concepts is the same between languages. However, the way these regions get activated is different from person to person.
This means that humans don’t have a unique way with how they think of things. The connections of our brains have evolved in a similar way no matter what language we speak. We think about math the same way maybe because math is the same in both languages, but we also think about emotions and other social concepts in the same way maybe because we have similar experiences in our lives.
However, how fast will our brain make these connections is a matter of each individual and it might have to do with practice. We have all learned how to solve quadratic equations when in school (I checked your curriculums) but that doesn’t mean that we can all solve them as fast since we haven’t been asked to solve a quadratic equation in many many years.
This study did only look into samples from 20 individuals and 2 different languages so the team is not ready to make any overarching statements about all people and all languages, yet it gives us a better understanding of people and the effects of language and culture in the understanding of abstract concepts like truth, sadness, ethics, and spirituality.
Next up: It’s all in the eyes
Our travels now bring us to Chile and to a group of researchers that created a model that can detect early signs of dementia by investigating the eyes of the patient and the electrical signals they generate with different stimuli.
The group examining the electrical signals generated by the eyes managed to model a concept called “complexity” which exists in physiology but is hard to quantify. The main point is that as we age or with the presence of diseases, the brain complexity drops. If the brain works well then high levels of complexity should be present (yes all healthy brains are complex no matter how stupid some people are).
The study happened in 2 groups of rats, one genetically modified to develop Alzheimer’s and the other healthy. The rats were subjected to different visual stimuli (meaning different lights, pictures, or videos) and the electrical activity in the retina was measured. Through their mathematical modeling, they managed to see a difference between young and healthy rats and older or sick rats. This is quite exciting as this tool shows a potential to be used for the early detection of neurodegenerative diseases that now can only be identified after some time with some more intense symptoms. Read more about the research and the methods used in the article from Healthy Mega here.
Any more news this week?
People in academia are constantly coming up with new and exciting things so if you need more to quench your curiosity here are some more headlines.
First Australians ate giant eggs of huge flightless birds, ancient proteins confirm, by Cambridge University
Medicinal cannabis reduces pain and the need for opiate painkillers among cancer patients, by PsyPost
That’s all for this week! I hope that the rest of the week will be calm and rewarding. Did you like this newsletter? If you did you can subscribe to it at the top of the page and why not share it around using this sexy little button here
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Until next week… take care and be kind [=