A photo from open sources
University of Southern California staff have a curious study that allowed them to figure out what the human brain clarifies unfamiliar words, focusing on the image, not letters.
You might think that we remember previously unknown words in in the form of a set of individual letters, but in reality this is not so. Scientists from a private research institution in los angeles came to the conclusion that the human brain perceives a new word in the form of a holistic pictures, such as a photograph of a blackboard on which it written in large chalk.
Forty-eight people took part in this experiment. Each of them was given leaflets with several dozen little-known words. Researchers asked volunteers to start memorizing words, while scanning the brain of each with a magnetic resonance imager, in order to determine which area of the central nervous system most involved.
It turned out that, pronouncing new words by letter, a person remembers them a little differently than we previously thought. Neurons responsible for the speech function, fix the whole word in the memory, then have assimilate it as an image. The system was called “visual dictionary. ”
It is possible that this discovery will be useful for linguists and educators. It turns out that phonetic analysis is not the best a way to memorize new words. Do you know about useful brain products?
