The human brain is mysterious, extraordinarily capable, and without a doubt wonderful. Our understanding of it grows every day, but there are still details about its internal mechanisms that we do not fully comprehend. How is a new idea incorporated? In what way is a concept assimilated and developed? How is a memory 'recorded'? A team at Carnegie Mellon University decided to investigate this through specific neural representations.
Last Tuesday I received an electric shock. At first glance this information seems irrelevant, but the fact that I mentioned it probably activated a region in the brain of whoever read it, searching for a reference to the sensation of receiving an electric shock. Now, how was that information registered in the first place? Many things are assimilated through direct experience (like the shock itself), but others are transmitted indirectly.
Let's change the example: thousands of people watch a documentary about giraffes. Through that documentary they learn that a giraffe needs more than 30 kilograms of foliage per day, and its digestive system tends to be more efficient than that of other herbivores. What has our brain just done with that data?
The Study at Carnegie Mellon
A group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University decided to find out with a study in which 16 people participated. All of them received information about eight extinct animals, including their diets and their habitat. Andrew Bauer, lead researcher, and professor of cognitive neuroscience Marcel Just, used a functional magnetic resonance imaging system to obtain precise images while all these new concepts were invoked by the brain.
Each of those concepts generated a kind of 'signature', and with the help of a software platform, the researchers were able to recognize which animal each participant was thinking about at any given moment, which could be interpreted as 'reading the mind'.
Another very interesting aspect is that when two or more animals share a feature, the brain's 'signatures' have a certain similarity. And once the details about an animal have been fully assimilated, they remain intact even in the face of new information, exposing the so-called 'neural durability' of what we learn.
The idea is that the study will allow the development of new learning methods in the future, but most importantly, to better understand the loss of knowledge caused by conditions such as brain damage, dementia, and the ever-present Alzheimer's disease.
