Transcript
A new study by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University has demonstrated that spoken language is understood in a completely different way from written language. Even though the information may be exactly the same, when something is spoken, entirely different areas of the brain are activated as compared with that information being transmitted by the written word, according to a report in the journal Human Brain Mapping.
This has important implications in many areas, including education and science--and even the way in which talking on a cell phone affects driving. Reading a book produces one kind of memory. Listening to an audio book that conveys the exact same words produces a completely different set of memories.. Reading the news in a newspaper is not the same as listening to the same news on the radio. The medium, in short, is part of the message.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure activity in the brains of people who were either reading or listening to various types of information. The high-tech equipment measured activity in 20,000 brain locations every three seconds to produce a comprehensive map of the way the brain was processing information.
One key difference was that when someone is reading, the right side of the brain tends to be relatively inactive. The right brain tends to conceptualize things more holistically than the left brain, which tends to be more logical and incremental.
When people were listening to the same sentences, an area called the pars triangularis was activated. The pars triangularis is located in Broca's area, which is associated with language processing. Broca's area has a component of active working memory that stores information temporarily, particularly sounds and their meanings.
When someone is reading, the words on the page don't disappear. They are there for reference in case you forget what you've read. When words are spoken, they vanish quickly, each one lasting typically less than a second. There has to be some way to store them all so that they can be combined in the brain to form meaningful information. That is what takes place in Broca's area. It stores the sounds until they can be processed.
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