According to research, our brain can understand written sentences 'in the blink of an eye'

According to a new study, the human brain can distinguish the basic structures of written language at a glance; This allows us to quickly consume the flood of information that smartphones provide us.

By measuring the brain activity of 36 volunteers, scientists found that people could detect basic sentence structures in as little as 125 milliseconds, or the blink of an eye.

This means that humans can process words as quickly as we understand visual scenes; it is a skill that allows us to constantly observe and manipulate the world around us. The new finding was published in the journal Wednesday, October 23. Science DevelopmentsIt could help uncover important clues about how our brains encode language, the researchers said.

Studying how the brain processes written messages allows scientists to better understand the properties of language, especially those that are not linked to speech. Liina Pylkkanenprofessor of linguistics and psychology at New York University, told LiveScience.

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Studying the neurobiology of language is often made difficult by the mouth, which forces us to “transform language into a sequence of brain activity” in order to speak words out loud, Pylkkänen said. This limits our understanding of the properties of language to the information required by the word-by-word serialization required for speech.

To overcome this problem, researchers used a non-invasive technique called magnetoencephalography, which uses magnetic fields to monitor electrical activity in the brain. During scanning, volunteers were presented with a three-word sentence structure flashed on the screen for 300 ms, followed by a second set of words that were either left the same or replaced with one word. The participants’ task was to evaluate whether the second sentence was the same as the first or whether it had been changed.

The scans revealed that the brain’s left temporal cortex (which is part of the organ’s outermost layer and is key to understanding language) showed higher activity for three-word sentences than for unstructured word lists, with this activity occurring at just 125 ms.

Participants performed best when sentences contained a subject, verb, and object; Phrases such as “nurses clean wounds” showed the fastest brain activity when compared to lists of nouns such as “heart lungs liver.”

This rapid detection was also seen in sentences containing agreement errors in which the verb did not match the plural form of the subject; for example, “Nurses clean wounds.” The brain also quickly detected irrational sentences such as “nurses clean wounds.” The researchers said this shows that our brains not only detect the presence of words but also apply our prior knowledge about the world to better parse what sentences mean.

“Just like your own car can be quickly recognized in a parking lot, certain language structures can be quickly recognized and lead to a rapid syntactic effect in the brain,” Pylkkänen said. he said. “This is interesting because the (sentence) structural information is abstract, but somehow you can still grasp it from the stimulus.”

The researchers plan to follow up their findings by further examining the types of sentence structures the brain can quickly detect and seeing whether these are compatible with the types of sentences people first learned as children. They also plan to investigate whether other visual stimuli, such as images, are processed using any of the same mechanisms we use to understand text.

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