Found in Translation: Universal Brain Activity When People Find Meaning in Stories, Regardless of Language
Abstract
Decoding the neural representation of story meanings across languages
Drawing from a common lexicon of semantic units, humans fashion
narratives whose meaning transcends that of their individual utterances.
However, while brain regions that represent lower-level semantic units,
such as words and sentences, have been identified, questions remain
about the neural representation of narrative comprehension, which
involves inferring cumulative meaning.
To address these questions, we
exposed English, Mandarin, and Farsi native speakers to native language
translations of the same stories during fMRI scanning. Using a new
technique in natural language processing, we calculated the distributed
representations of these stories (capturing the meaning of the stories
in high-dimensional semantic space), and demonstrate that using these
representations we can identify the specific story a participant was
reading from the neural data. Notably, this was possible even when the
distributed representations were calculated using stories in a different
language than the participant was reading. Our results reveal that
identification relied on a collection of brain regions most prominently
located in the default mode network. These results demonstrate that
neuro-semantic encoding of narratives happens at levels higher than
individual semantic units and that this encoding is systematic across
both individuals and languages.
“Decoding the neural
representation of story meanings across languages” by Morteza Dehghani,
Reihane Boghrati, Kingson Man, Joe Hoover, Sarah I. Gimbel, Ashish
Vaswani, Jason D. Zevin, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Andrew S. Gordon,
Antonio Damasio, and Jonas T. Kaplan in Human Brain Mapping. Published online September 20 2017 doi:10.1002/hbm.23814
BUSINESSWEEK JUNE 11, 2015
BY PAUL FORD
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