The way in which the human mind remembers sure people is carefully linked to how we speak about them.
Neuroscientists have now proven that pronouns like ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘they’ can activate the identical neuron within the mind as an individual’s particular title.
Take these two sentences for instance: “Shrek and Courtney Love walked into a bar. He sat down at a table.” In experiments, the pronoun ‘he’ prompted the identical neuron within the hippocampus to fireside because the phrase ‘Shrek’.
The hippocampus helps the retrieval of phrases, numbers and ideas from our reminiscence, and pronouns look like a part of that course of.
A number of the neurons within the hippocampus are hypothesized to be ‘idea cells’, though they’re extra famously known as Jennifer Aniston cells. In 2005, scientists discovered that images of celebrities like Jennifer Aniston activated particular neurons within the hippocampus.
Within the years since, scientists have substantiated the theoretical existence of those so-called idea cells, which appear to retailer representations of individuals, summary ideas, or objects.
Idea cells activate when somebody sees an image of a selected particular person, after they hear or learn the title of that particular person, or after they attempt to recall that particular person from reminiscence.
Now, it appears in addition they reactivate when a pronoun is used as a proxy for an individual’s title.
The research relies on mind recordings from sufferers with intractable epilepsy, who had electrodes implanted deep of their hippocampus to determine the place their seizures have been occurring.
These implants additionally give scientists the chance to check how particular person neurons within the hippocampus hearth throughout wakeful exercise.
When a participant was proven an image of Shrek, researchers seen a selected neuron would hearth of their hippocampus.
This similar neuron additionally activated when volunteers have been requested to learn a passage about Shrek and Courtney Love and the title ‘Shrek’ appeared.
Step by step, the exercise of that neuron started to fade, however when the pronoun “he” was utilized in a later sentence to discuss with Shrek, the identical ‘Shrek’ neuron activated. When volunteers learn the pronoun “she”, however, it didn’t activate the identical cell.
What’s extra, if Shrek was absent from the primary sentence, the pronoun ‘he’ didn’t activate the ‘Shrek’ idea cell. This means that solely pronouns assumed to be referring to Shrek activate the idea neuron.
“We had the participants answer a question at the end of the sentences about who performed the action,” explains neuroscientist Matthew Self from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience.
“We could predict whether the patients would give the correct answer based on the activity of the individual concept cells.”
Volunteers additionally learn sentences the place two individuals had the identical pronouns. On this case, whichever particular person evoked probably the most exercise within the hippocampus to start out with was the one which obtained assigned the pronoun in a while.
“This could be based on chance fluctuations in activity on a trial-by-trial basis or an internal preference for one of the two characters in the sentence,” says Self.
The findings counsel that idea cells assist the mind hyperlink new data to an already present idea.
“For example, when we read about Shrek that ‘he’ put on sunglasses, we can update Shrek’s representation and predict his future appearance,” the authors of the research write.
Tellingly, individuals who have suffered injury to the hippocampus can typically have bother producing or understanding pronouns.
“Theories about the evolving mental representation of the narrative during reading suggest that previously read words are stored in working memory so that they can be combined with new information,” clarify the worldwide crew.
“How brain networks implement such syntactic computations is a topic for future research, which can now be investigated.”
The research was printed in Science.
