Mapping how language is represented in the human brain

In the past decade one trend in neuroscience has been to switch away from using simple, controlled experiments, and instead to study how the brain reacts to more complex, natural situations. Alex Huth will talk about one experiment in which subjects listened to hours of natural, narrative stories from The Moth Radio Hour while undergoing fMRI scanning. In order to take advantage of this complex, uncontrolled data, we must use sophisticated computational modeling techniques. The result is a detailed map of how the meanings of words are represented in the human brain. Surprisingly, these maps are also highly consistent from subject to subject.

Speaker: Dr. Alex Huth, UC Berkeley