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June 5, 2008 • KR Blog • Reading

What “Apple” Means to Your Brain

By Heather Christle

I’ve found that one of the most consistently rewarding places for me to go in my online wanderings is Science Daily. They report on recent studies & discoveries in straightforward language, and their Mind & Brain section is completely delicious. Yesterday I came across this article, about a new computer model (pdf) for how the brain represents meaning, specifically for concrete nouns. (That pdf is to the original article from Science, and if you go here you can find further supporting online materials.)

The stimulus words are beautiful:

airplane, ant, apartment, arch, arm, barn, bear, bed, bee, beetle, bell, bicycle, bottle, butterfly, car, carrot, cat, celery, chair, chimney, chisel, church, closet, coat, corn, cow, cup, desk, dog, door, dress, dresser, eye, fly, foot, glass, hammer, hand, horse, house, igloo, key, knife, leg, lettuce, pants, pliers, refrigerator, saw, screwdriver, shirt, skirt, spoon, table, telephone, tomato, train, truck, watch, window.

Also pleasing are the associated verbs. The scientists, led by Stephen M. Mitchell and Marcel Adam Just, designed semantic features using a trillion word text corpus to track the stimulus nouns’ co-occurence with the following 25 verbs:

see, hear, listen, taste, smell, eat, touch, rub, lift, manipulate, run, push, fill, move, ride, say, fear, open, approach, near, enter, drive, wear, break, and clean.

For example, “spoon” co-occurs relatively frequently with “eat,” and more rarely with “listen.” (I think I am better at explaining this end of things than the fMRI images. For that I recommend you read the Science Daily piece.)

So this is all great, but the thing that made me really explode with happiness is a quote from Just, who said:

the brain represents the meaning of a concrete noun in areas of the brain associated with how people sense it or manipulate it. The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it.

An apple is what you do with it! I am so in love with this sentence.

I have to wonder, also, about those things we do with an apple that are statistically insignificant and/or potentially impossible. What does a brain look like when it is thinking about forgetting a tomato? Or translating it? I imagine that part of a brain’s delight in reading poems comes from having a noun tickle some unexpected area.

Or we could ask what it is like for a brain to read Wallace Stevens:

Opusculum paedagogum.
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.

How would a neuroscientist map a brain on via negativa? What is it like to see that which the pears are not? I would love to see the brain at work as concrete nouns become abstract.

The Kenyon Review was founded in 1939. The resources for the new literary journal were provided by Gordon Keith Chalmers, President of Kenyon College, while the inspiration to establish the journal and raise the national stature of the institution had come from his wife Roberta Teale Swartz, herself a poet and a friend and protege of Robert Frost. Frost encouraged the idea and visited Kenyon more than once. The poet and critic John Crowe Ransom was recruited to Kenyon by Chalmers with the express purpose in mind of his launching a distinguished magazine. During his 21-year tenure, Ransom published such internationally known writers as Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, William Empson, Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Burke, and Delmore Schwartz, as well as younger writers: Flannery O'Connor, Robert Lowell, and Peter Taylor, to name a few. It was perhaps the best known and most influential literary magazine in the English-speaking world during the 1940s and '50s. In 1969, discouraged by the quarterly's financial burdens and sagging reputation, Kenyon College ceased publication of The Kenyon Review. The journal was revived in 1979, and in June 1990, internationally acclaimed poet and editor Marilyn Hacker was hired as the Review's first full-time (and first female) editor. She quickly broadened the quarterly's scope to include more minority and marginalized viewpoints. In April 1994, the trustees directed that The Kenyon Review be continued, but with significant cost-reducing and revenue-enhancing initiatives. Hacker left and David Lynn (acting editor in 1989-90), Kenyon English professor, was named editor on a two-thirds time basis. The magazine's financial picture has since stabilized and improved dramatically. The creation of a Kenyon Review Board of Trustees and a renewed commitment by Kenyon College combined to guarantee the financial health of the Review and to free its editors to pursue increased excellence. Such is the status of The Kenyon Review today.
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