Baku, January 17 (AZERTAC). UC Berkeley team use fMRI to find out where semantically linked concepts are processed in the brain.

Scientists have put together the first ever map of how the brain organizes the thousands of images that come flooding in through our eyes every day.

A team at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see.

To illustrate their findings, they have created the first map of how the brain organizes these categories across the cortex.

he result — achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while test subjects watched hours of video clips — is what researchers call 'a continuous semantic space'.

The UC Berkeley team have mapped this data across the human cortex to show which areas of the brain deal with which categories of objects we see in the world around us.

Some relationships between categories make sense - for example, that humans and animals share the same 'semantic neighborhood' - while others - like the apparent link between hallways and buckets - seem less obvious.

Nevertheless, the researchers found that different people share a similar semantic layout.

he Berkeley team used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to record the brain activity of five researchers as they each watched two hours of film clips.

Researchers then analyzed the readings to find correlations in data and build a model showing how each of 30,000 subdivisions in the cortex responded to the 1,700 categories of objects and actions shown.

Next, they used principal components analysis, a statistical method that can summarize large data sets, to find the 'semantic space' that was common to all the study subjects. The results are presented in multicoloured, multi-dimensional maps showing the more than 1,700 visual categories and their relationships to one another.

Categories that activate the same brain areas have similar colours. For example, humans are green, animals are yellow, vehicles are pink and violet and buildings are blue.

'Our methods open a door that will quickly lead to a more complete and detailed understanding of how the brain is organized,' said Alexander Huth, lead author of the study published yesterday in the journal Neuron. 'Already, our online brain viewer appears to provide the most detailed look ever at the visual function and organization of a single human brain.'