Researchers of a new study found that the brain uses a mechanism similar to what computers use to make sense of unfamiliar situations.
Have you ever wondered how the brain makes sense of unfamiliar situations? Like recognizing familiar faces in an unfamiliar place or seeing someone you've previously known play a different role. The mechanism used by the brain in such situation has often baffled scientists until now. Researchers have found that the mechanism the brain uses to make sense of unfamiliar situations is similar to the mechanism a computer uses to function. The brain also uses the "pointer system" that computers use to tell it where to look for information stored elsewhere in the system to replace a variable.
For the study, researchers used sentences containing familiar words but arranged in unique ways to test the brain's ability to understand the role familiar words play in a sentence even when those words are used in unfamiliar ways.
For example, if a person says "I want to desk you", the listener automatically understands that the word "desk" is used as a verb and not as a noun.
"The fact that you understand that the sentence is grammatically well formed means you can process these completely novel inputs," said Randall O'Reilly, a professor in CU-Boulder's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and co-author of the study. "But in the past when we've tried to get computer models of a brain to do that, we haven't been successful."
Researchers reinforced the fact that humans are able to make sense of sentences with many variables like a subject, a verb and often, an object. The brain is also capable of assigning various words to these variables and still making sense of the sentence structure.
Computers also perform similar tasks. For example, a computer program could create an email form a letter that has a pointer in the greeting line. The pointer would then draw the name information for each individual recipient into the greeting being sent to that person.
At the end of the study, researchers confirmed that though the brain uses the same pointer system, its functions are not the same as when used by a computer. While the brain needs to be trained to use this pointer system and gets better at it with time, computers can be programmed to use this system immediately.
"As your brain learns, it gets better and better at processing these novel kinds of information," O'Reilly said.
