To find out our way around a new city, we often use maps and sites to find the fastest and most reliable route between two places. Now, new research suggests that our brain can use similar procedures to “navigate” among the concepts related to it.
Researchers have developed a mathematical model to check how the brain represents both spatial and meaning information. The latter includes knowledge about the meaning and importance of various people, places and things; Brain activity related to these concepts occurs when a person sees a person, place or thing in real time and when they remember it Memory,
The model showed how both spatial and semantic information can be represented in the same areas of the brain – and it suggests that the brain can handle both types of information equally, scientists stated on 10 March in the journal. owner,
Two parts of the brain that focus on memory and navigation – Sea horse And the entorehinal cortex – both contain neurons that fire when people go through their physical environment. They also contain neurons that fire in response to some concepts or ideas, Concepts known as cellsThis suspected researchers that these ideas could be related.
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“Spatial representatives and conceptual representations, and even meaning computing and spatial computing, seem very different,” study co-author studies Tatsuya hagaA computational neurocientist at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan told Live Science. Cementic and spatial computing refer to how the brains and computers process information in these different places.
“However, there is a connection between those two different things,” Haga said. “So perhaps the brain, especially the hippocampus and the antorehinal cortex, are using a theory to calculate many things, which include Language,
Haga and his colleagues developed a mathematical model that mimics some tasks in the hippocampus to show how these methods are related. The model connects two tasks that help control how the processing hub changes from one place or idea to another: a heir representation, which predicts the possibility of moving from one physical place to another, and the word embeding, which holds the relationship between words.
The team then asked its model to navigate a fake physical or ideological space. The “physical” location was a simulated structure, sometimes with separate rooms, while in the conceptual location, the metaphor “distance” between the related words is detected, in which the similes are used.
In response to these tasks, the model produced patterns that resemble the activity of two types of neurons in the hippocampus and entorehinal cortex: one is involved in spatial awareness and the second concept involved in recognition.
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The team showed that the same algorithm can be used to navigate the virtual spaces, which can also catch relations between respective concepts, such as countries and their capitals. In this example, to navigate from the concept of “Berlin” from the concept of “France”, the model can first activate a concept cell for the capital cities, which will take it from “France” to “Paris” and then activate an additional cell representing “Germany”, which will take it to “Berlin”.
“When you are trying to navigate a labyrinth city, you should have some kind of map with sites and directions,” Rob mockA computational neuroscientist who was not involved in the study at Royal Holow, London University, told Live Science. “And the idea is that you can do this when you are thinking too.”
The model can use various similes to remove metaphor distance between different meaning concepts.
“So if I am thinking of a dog, how do I get ‘cat’? Or how do I get ‘king’?” Mok said. “These are different directions, and you may need to navigate in different ways to get there.”
New mathematical model shows a possible way human Both spatial and semantic information can be processed. However, no one has shown whether the real mind learns and processes the information in the same way that models do.
Haga told Live Science that he expects to examine this biological system in future work that is using models that are similar to biological brains.
