Picture a living thing—say, a dog. Now imagine a hammer. You just activated two different areas of your visual cortex, the brain region that processes eyesight. Thinking of a dog activates an area that deals with animate objects, whereas a hammer excites one that processes inanimate things. Now a new study shows something surprising: the same thing would have happened even if you had never seen a dog or a hammer before.
Psychologist Alfonso Caramazza of Harvard University and his team found that the visual cortex’s organization around these categories of knowledge is similar in sighted people and in individuals who were born blind. The finding challenges the long-held notion that the two separate processing areas exist solely as the result of learning to recognize the differences in the visual appearance between living and nonliving things, says cognitive neuroscientist Marius Peelen of Princeton University, who was not involved in the study.
Instead something else must be driving the visual cortex’s organization as well. That something could be connections to other brain areas, Caramazza suggests. From the visual cortex, information about living and nonliving objects is shuttled to different areas of the brain so as to trigger appropriate reactions. Animals, for example, could be dangerous, “but you don’t have to run away from a hammer,” he says. The new findings suggest that the wiring system that connects different areas of the visual cortex with appropriate regions in the rest of the brain is innate—it does not have to form gradually based on visual inputs. That means “the organization of the brain has to be understood in terms of our evolutionary history,” Caramazza notes. Our brain’s structure is such that we can distinguish prey and aggressors from other kinds of objects, and we have retained this structure even as we get “milk from bottles and meat from the butcher shop.”
This article was originally published with the title Wired for Categorization.
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Add CommentYes, we have different learning styles, but TEACHING to those learning styles has no research support for increased achievement. Trying to match instruction to the students' learning styles might actually result in lowered achievement. View Daniel Willingham, cognitive psychologist, for an explanation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf as is written above, important assocations between different parts of the brain are in fact innate, the coding of the development of the billions of neural links onto ADN must occur in an extremely compressed form to fit it all in...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCan you get the brain to respond to inanimate objects as if they were animate? If we associate "hammer" to immediate personal danger enough times, does the brain register it as something other than "inanimate?" Do those who really like flowers register them as animate vs those of us who really don't care about them? I've met a many people who like math who describe different numbers as having personality. Is that something similar?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe shall see.
Wired for categorization? Absolutely.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn genesis, one of the first tasks God gave man was to name all the plants and animals. That is categorization at its most basic.