New digital environments and social networks bombard us with quick messages, but is our brain to process them? A study has verified that the answer could be affirmative, since the left temporal cortex takes about a blink to detect the structure of a sentence.
Specifically, 130 milliseconds is how long it takes the brain to detect the linguistic structure of a short phrase, similar to the speed of blinking, according to research reported this Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
The study’s conclusions imply that the human brain’s language processing capacity is faster than scientists thought; and as fast as the perception of visual scenes.
Until now, this ability to understand language was associated with a slower process, which researchers believed took place word by word.
The study authors conducted experiments to measure brain activity while participants (21 women and 4 men) read lists of words that could be complete sentences. “Nurses clean wounds” or single words, such as “hearts, lungs, livers”.
To measure brain activity, they used a technique known as magnetoencephalography, which records the functional activity of the brain by capturing the magnetic fields produced by the activity of neurons.
The results showed that the left temporal cortex of the brain, which is the part responsible for language comprehension, takes 130 milliseconds to distinguish sentences or lists of three words after seeing them.
“The brain detects the structure of a three-word sentence in the time it takes to hear a syllable, which would indicate that the understanding of a sentence occurs as quickly as the perception of a visual scene,” says one of them. the authors, Liina Pylkkänem, researcher in the area of Linguistics and Psychology at New York University.
The experiments also pointed out that the left temporal cortex detects the structure of the sentence even if it contains grammatical or agreement errors, which would indicate that what the brain quickly captures is the structure, not the correctness with which it is written.
Another complementary investigation directed by the scientist from the University of New York, Nigel Flowers and published a few days ago in the Journal of Neuroscience, also found, through the same type of experiment, that the brain tends to mentally correct errors in a sentence 400 milliseconds after having seen it.
“This would explain why readers overlook minor errors when reading: their brains have already corrected them internally.”Flowers said in a statement from New York University.
“Our work makes it clear that our brain not only has the instinctive ability to instinctively process quick messages, but can also make quick decisions based on them, such as ‘cleaning’ email or responding to something short on social media,” Pylkkänen emphasizes. , recently affiliated with the University of Colorado.