This image illustrates how the study participants learned about the habitat and the diet of eight animals, such as the cytar (not its real zoological name). The set of habitat brain regions (A-green) and diet (B-red and blue) regions where the new knowledge was stored. (L refers to left hemisphere of the brain.) Image Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University
by Daniel Culpan
Cutting-edge brain imaging technology has offered the first glimpse into how new concepts develop in the human brain.
The research, carried out at Carnegie Mellon University and published in Human Brain Mapping, involved teaching people a new concept and observing how it was coded in the same areas of the brain through neural representations.
The “olinguito” — a largely fruit-eating carnivore species that lives in rainforest treetops, newly discovered in 2013 — was initially used as a concept. Marcel Just, a professor of cognitive neuroscience in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, commented: “When people learned that the olinguito eats mainly fruit instead of meat, a region of their left inferior frontal gyrus — as well as several other areas — stored the new information according to its own code.”
The findings revealed that this new knowledge of the olinguito was encoded in exactly the same parts of the brain by everyone who learned it, indicating that the brain may operate its own kind of universal filing system.
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