Neural Sight organization

First map of how the brain organizes everything we see

December 20, 2012

These sections of a semantic-space map show how some of the different categories of living and non-living objects that we see are related to one another in the brain’s “semantic space” (credit: Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu, Jack Gallant/Neuron)

How do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to organize all the categories of objects and actions that we see, and they have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings.

Continuous semantic space

The result — achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while the subjects watched hours of movie clips — is what researchers call “a continuous semantic space.”/.../