Pictures, words and the brain

摘要

OVER the past few years cognitive neuro-scientists have made great strides in charting the functional organization of the human brain. These developments have been made possible by increasingly sophisticated functional neuroimaging techniques, such aspositron-emission tomography and functional magnetic-resonance imaging, which provide an index of neural activity in different areas of the brain during the performance of a cognitive task, Several notable contributions have been made by scientists at the National Institute of Neurology, London, who,have concentrated largely on the neural representation of language processes. On page 254 of this issue1 they describe their latest result, and it is an important one -- a map of the areas of the brain that are involved in processing the meaning of words.