When we look at
a known word, our brain sees it like a picture, not a group of letters needing
to be processed. That's the finding from a Georgetown University Medical Center
(GUMC) study which shows the brain learns words quickly by tuning neurons to
respond to a complete word, not parts of it. Neurons respond differently to
real words, such as turf, than to nonsense words, such as turt, showing that a
small area of the brain is holistically tuned to recognize complete words. People
are not recognizing words by quickly spelling them out or identifying parts of
words, as some researchers have suggested. Instead, neurons in a small brain
area remember how the whole word looks—using what could be called a visual
dictionary.
This small area
in the brain is found in the left side of the visual cortex, opposite from the
fusiform face area on the right side, which remembers how faces look. One area
is selective for a whole face, allowing us to quickly recognize people, and the
other is selective for a whole word, which helps us read quickly. The study
asked 25 adult participants to learn a set of 150 nonsense words. The brain
plasticity associated with learning was investigated with fMRI-rapid adaptation,
both before and after training. The investigators found that the visual word
form area changed as the participants learned the nonsense words. Before
training the neurons responded like the training words were nonsense words, but
after training the neurons responded to the learned words like they were real
words.
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