fMRI is definitely the “in” tool in neuroscience. It allows a scientist to see what areas of the brain light up while a person is doing something. A study I recently came across is using this technique to work out how the brain deals with words. More specifically they are mapping the areas of the brain that light up when someone here’s a word associated with a “concrete noun” – a noun related to something experienced with one of the five senses.
Hmm, not quite sure how interesting that is, but then I read this –
“We are fundamentally perceivers and actors,” he said. “So the brain represents the meaning of a concrete noun in areas of the brain associated with how people sense it or manipulate it. The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it. Our work is a small but important step in breaking the brain’s code.”
This is SUCH an important point in understanding how human beings function. Our nervous systems involve a whole network involved in sensing stimuli from the environment and a whole network involved in carrying out actions. These two networks are intensely and complexly (is there such a word?) linked up to each other. At a simple level, that implies we sense things then we act in response. In fact, it’s more complicated. Some neuroscientists and philosophers have suggested that sensing and acting are actually two aspects of the exact same thing – that sensing is a kind of an act. That seems right at some level, but it’s also quite challenging. This particular insight from these researchers makes that idea a little clearer I think. We can see that the brain actually represents what it perceives by using the areas that are involved in carrying out the actions normally associated with the object being perceived. In other words, perception and understanding are fundamentally entangled with acting.
Heroes Not Zombies 
So if I understand your conclusions, one has to chew, taste and smell an apple to “understand” what an apple is. Does this mean that one has to live in poverty to truly understand what poverty is or can it be understood from reading a biography of one who has lived in poverty?
My head is spinning. 🙂
Guess that tells us yet another way the power of words!
Ah, well, you see, you always have to be careful with research. This research is focused entirely on words related to things we SENSE – in the strict sense of what our sensory equipment detects. So, I’d be VERY wary of generalising out to other concepts such as poverty!
But you’re right to raise the question of what we can really understand. Every day I’m trying to understand what patients are experiencing. Luckily (for me) I’ve had a very healthy life and I haven’t experienced any of the illnesses they come to see me with. Does that mean I can’t understand my patients? Don’t think so! If I had also experienced the disease one of my patients presented with, then, sure, I’d have a DIFFERENT understanding from the one I have now, but would it let me understand THEM better? I’m not convinced. (Yikes! This is rapidly heading into another post entirely!) Maybe its the word “understand” that’s the problem here. Maybe I should have said “making sense of” instead?
Yes, spaceagesage, it certainly shows a link between words (non-material phenomena) and the brain (a material phenomenon) – and that issue is the “hard problem” – how do we explain consciousness?!
I don’t think that one has to experience something directly to understand it, though that certainly helps. I have this discussion with my students quite often; I don’t need to be a black person, for example, to understand that the decision to put a noose on the cover of a magazine is offensive ( ).
As far as concrete things go, though, this research makes a lot of sense. I understand the idea of an apple through my interactions with apples. The actual hands-on experiences are what define the objects for me, and my experience of a thing may be very different from someone else’s; I have no foundation to understand the experience of eating oysters, for example (I’m CRAZY allergic to shellfish), so my brain will light up in different ways than, say, someone who frequents the local neighborhood raw bar.
Bob,
Thanks for explaining further. I see my error now. You pointed out in the first paragraph that it was a noun “related to something experienced with one of the five senses” though I didn’t catch that the first time around. I can be dangerous in my thinking if I read too quickly. 🙂
@mrschili Funnily enough I’ve also got an allergy to shellfish – well, actually, for me it’s “bivalves” – mussels, oysters, scallops etc. I seem to be fine with crab, lobster and all kinds of fish!
@rlovison can’t we all!!
i’m actually doing a research about the human brain.s capacity. i’ve read this article saying that we’re just using 10% of our total brain capacity. many articles also oppose this statement, but is this really true?
You know my first thought is that it’s as difficult to know the brain’s capacity as it is a human being’s. In fact when you think of it, at least one of the things the brain is involved in is the creation of the self. And what are the limits, or the capacities, of the self? Of the whole person? It strikes me that the phenomenon of emergence which has been describe from the studies of complex systems demonstrates that something as complex as the brain is continuously developing and growing…..creating endlessly