Wired for Categorization

Author(s): Nicole Branan

Source: Scientific American Mind , Vol. 20, No. 7 (January/February 2010), p. 11
Published by: Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/24940264

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 >> A N A T O M Y

Wired for
Categorization STAY
INFORMED
Our innate brain structure
reflects how we classify
the world around us
Picture a living thing — say, a dog. Now imag- with
ine 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
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objects, whereas a hammer excites one that
processes inanimate things. Now a new study ScientificAmerican.com makes it easier than ever before
shows something surprising: the same thing to stay up-to-date on all of the latest science, health, and
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Psychologist Alfonso Caramazza of Har-
vard University and his team found that the
visual cortex’s organization around these
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categories of knowledge is similar in sighted Receive the latest news as it’s published
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people and in individuals who were born blind.
The finding challenges the long-held notion
that the two separate processing areas exist ALERTS
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solely as the result of learning to recognize the LLearn when the newest issues are available online
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.
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Instead something else must be driving the
((audio and video)
visual cortex’s organization as well. That
something could be connections to other brain
areas, Caramazza suggests. From the visual MOBILE SITE
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cortex, information about living and nonliving Get Scientific American news and daily trivia on your
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objects is shuttled to different areas of the web-enabled device. wap.ScientificAmerican.com
w
brain so as to trigger appropriate reactions.
Animals, for example, could be dangerous,
“but you don’t have to run away from a ham-
mer,” 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 VISIT ScientificAmerican.com TO STAY INFORMED.

the brain has to be understood in terms of our > www.ScientificAmerican.com/newsletters

evolutionary history,” Caramazza notes. Our > www.ScientificAmerican.com/rss
brain’s structure is such that we can distin- > www.ScientificAmerican.com/podcast
guish prey and aggressors from other kinds of ScientificAmerican.com > www.ScientificAmerican.com/mobile
objects, and we have retained this structure
CORBIS

even as we get “milk from bottles and meat

from the butcher shop.” — Nicole Branan

w w w. S c i e nti f i c A m e r i c an .c o m/M in d © 20 09 SCIENTIFIC AMERIC AN, INC. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND 11

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