Word-specific neurons
Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2024 4:32 pm
This is pretty neat:
Editor's summary: "during reading, single cells in the medial temporal lobes that respond selectively to specific individuals also respond to pronouns that later in sentences refer to previously read nouns."
In a way it's quite unsurprising: obviously language and pronouns have some neural substrate. But it's interesting that, in effect, the brain rewires itself on the fly to interpret pronouns.
Editor's summary: "during reading, single cells in the medial temporal lobes that respond selectively to specific individuals also respond to pronouns that later in sentences refer to previously read nouns."
I don't have access to the article itself, so I can't say how solid it is.Abstract wrote:During discourse comprehension, every new word adds to an evolving representation of meaning that accumulates over consecutive sentences and constrains the next words. To minimize repetition and utterance length, languages use pronouns, like the word “she,” to refer to nouns and phrases that were previously introduced. It has been suggested that language comprehension requires that pronouns activate the same neuronal representations as the nouns themselves. We recorded from individual neurons in the human hippocampus during a reading task. Cells that were selective to a particular noun were later reactivated by pronouns that refer to the cells’ preferred noun. These results imply that concept cells contribute to a rapid and dynamic semantic memory network that is recruited during language comprehension.
In a way it's quite unsurprising: obviously language and pronouns have some neural substrate. But it's interesting that, in effect, the brain rewires itself on the fly to interpret pronouns.