"Brain's 'atlas' of words revealed"

"Volunteers - including lead author Alex Huth - listened to more than two hours of stories from a US radio programme while remaining still inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner...

The results were converted into a thesaurus-like map where the words were arranged on the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

They show that the semantic system is distributed broadly in more than 100 distinct areas across both halves - hemispheres - of the cortex and in intricate patterns that were consistent across individuals in the study.

The maps show that many areas of the human brain represent language describing people and social relations rather than abstract concepts.

But the same word could be repeated several times on different parts of the brain map. For example, the word "top" was represented in a part of the brain that responds to words about clothing and appearance, and also in a region that deals with numbers and measurements."

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36150503

This is really interesting. And now that there is a baseline, sort of, it would be really interesting to look at different people who process words differently, or use words differently. Do writers have more areas; do poets have less distinct barriers between these areas; do people with language processing problems have a different structure; does these areas develop over time, and how?

Is the map the same for processing as for producing (i.e. speaking/writing)?

They also published an "interactive brain viewer" where you can choose a word-concept-cluster and it shows you where your brain would process it: http://gallantlab.org/huth2016/