As brain extracts meaning from vision, study tracks progression of processing
Here’s the neuroscience of a neglected banana (and a lot of other things in daily life): Whenever you look at its color — green in the store, then yellow, and eventually brown on your countertop — your mind categorizes it as unripe, ripe, and then spoiled. A new study that tracked how the brain turns simple sensory inputs, such as “green,” into meaningful categories, such as “unripe,” shows that the information follows a progression through many regions of the cortex, and not exactly in the way many neuroscientists would predict. The study, led by researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, undermines the classic belief that separate cortical regions play distinct roles. Instead, as animals in the lab refined what they saw down to a specific understanding relevant to behavior, brain cells in each of six cortical regions operated along a continuum between sensory processing and categorization. To be...