Neuroscientists have discovered the secret to making our brain learn new words: using words as pictures.
People who can’t learn words with the sound system (which is the usual method of teaching reading) can learn new words as if it were a visual, which is a good strategy for learning new words quickly and effectively.
The nature of spelling representations in the human brain remains a topic of debate in the scientific world.
The new study revealed that the brain is able to learn new words very quickly, because it sees them as if it were a single block.
Researchers have discovered that a small part of our brain is holistic (adapted to word recognition in its entirety), rather than treating them as letters or syllables, from there, part of the brain could photograph words to recognize them.
Recent reports have pointed out that the area that visually shapes the word is the left occipital-temporal cortex, which contains a verification lexicon based on highly selective neural representations, to write real words individually. This theory predicts that we can selectively learn new words, and to do so we must increase the neural specificity of these specific words in the area that visually shapes words.
Dr. Maximilian Riesenhuber, a neuroscientist at Georgetown Medical Center University, who led the study, said:
“We do not quickly recognize the spelling of words or identify them as part of words, as some researchers have suggested. But do neurons in a small area of the brain help photograph the entire word and its shape, so it can be defined as in a visual dictionary?
A part of the brain called the “visual area of words” is vital for learning new words. Included in the visual cortex, it is found in fusiform rotation, an area of the brain that helps us recognize faces.
Dr. Riesenhuber says: “One area allows us to quickly recognize certain people and faces, while the other is selective for one complete word, which helps us read quickly. “
In the study, 25 participants were asked to learn new words that were truly absurd in terms of simplicity, and were also invited to learn new meaningless words.
Their brains were scanned before and after the experiment and the changes were analyzed.
The results showed that after learning different words, the area of the brain involved in photographing the forms of words began to respond to meaningless words as if they were real words.
Dr. Laurie Glezer, one of the first authors of the study, argues that: “This study is the first of its kind to show how neurons alter their harmonization with the words learned, demonstrating brain plasticity. “
People with reading issues may find it easier to learn new words, depending on the data collected, using words as images.
In fact, Dr. Riesenhuber is convinced that: “People who cannot learn words through the sound system (which is the usual method of teaching reading) can learn new words as if they were a visual: this can be a good strategy to learn new words quickly and effectively. ?
The area that analyzes the visual shape of the word is not interested in how the word sounds.
The fact that this type of learning occurs in only a small part of the brain is a good example of selective brain plasticity.
Learning a word seems to selectively increase the neural specificity of new words in the area of their visual form, adding them to the brain’s visual dictionary.
The study was published in the? Journal of Neuroscience? (Http://www. jneurosci. org/content/35/12/4965. full. pdf html)