I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
marvellous are Thy works;
Psalm 139:14
"Humans possess an exceptional ability to extract nuanced meaning through language—when we listen to speech, we can comprehend the meanings of up to tens of thousands of words and do so seamlessly across remarkably diverse concepts and themes," said senior author Ziv Williams.
"We also wanted to find how humans are able to process such diverse meanings during natural speech and through which we are able to rapidly comprehend the meanings of words across a wide array of sentences, stories, and narratives," Williams said.
To start addressing these questions, the scientists used a novel technology that allowed them to simultaneously record the activities of up to a hundred neurons from the brain while people listened to sentences (such as, "the child bent down to smell the rose") and short stories (for example, about the life and times of Elvis Presley).
For example, most people can rapidly tell the correct meaning of words such as "sun" and "son" or "see" and "sea" when used in a sentence, even though the words sound exactly the same.
"We found that certain neurons in the brain are able to reliably distinguish between such words, and they continuously anticipate the most likely meaning of the words based on the sentence contexts in which they are heard," said Williams.
Lastly, and perhaps most excitingly, the researchers found that, by recording a relatively small number of brain neurons, they could reliably predict the meanings of words as they were heard in real-time during speech.
That is, based on the activities of the neurons, the team could determine the general ideas and concepts experienced by an individual as they were being comprehended during speech." ScienceAlert
