Your brain builds abstract concepts with 3 types of meaning - Futurity

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Machine learning and human brain scans have revealed the regions of the brain behind how we form abstract concepts, like justice, ethics, and consciousness, researchers report. "Humans have the unique ability to construct abstract concepts that have no anchor in the physical world, but we often take this ability for granted," says senior author Marcel Just, professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. "In this study, we have shown that newly identified components of meaning used by the human brain [act] like an indexing system, similar to a library's card catalog, to compose the meaning of abstract concepts." The ability of humans to think abstractly plays a central role in scientific and intellectual progress.