Our Brains Represent The Meaning Of Words the Same Way Whether We Read Them Or Hear Them

By Emma Young In an era of TED talks, podcasts, and audiobooks, it’s easy to choose to listen to factual information or fiction, rather than to read it. But is that a good thing? Are there any differences in the way the brain processes the meaning of words that are heard rather than read? According to the researchers behind a thorough new study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the answer to this last question is “no”. But it may still be too soon to conclude that listening to an audiobook is effectively the same as reading it. Fatma Deniz at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues recruited six men and three women, all aged in their twenties and thirties. Their brains were scanned using fMRI while they listened to stories from a popular podcast, The Moth Radio Hour, and, separately, while they read those same stories. The researchers then looked at detailed maps of activity in parts of the brain’s cortex that processed the semantic information — the meaning — as participants read or listened to each word. They found that it didn’t matter which way the words were presented: both reading and listening produced virtually identical patterns. In addition, the locations of the discrete cortical regions that processed the meaning of different categories of word (for example “animals” or “emotional” words)  were similar from person to person. Based on previous findings, the team had expected some differences in...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Reading Source Type: blogs