Brain's 'atlas' of words revealed

Scientists in the US have mapped out how the brain organises language. Their "semantic atlas" shows how, for example, one region of the brain activates in response to words about clothing and appearance. The researchers found that these maps were quite similar across the small number of individuals in the study, even down to minor details. The work, by a team at the University of California, Berkeley, is published in the journal Nature. It had previously been proposed that information about words' meaning was represented in a group of brain regions known as the semantic system.