How the Moth Radio Hour helped scientists map out meaning in the brain

This is your brain on stories. By tracking the blood flow in people's brains as they listened to a storytelling radio show, scientists at UC Berkeley have mapped out where the meanings associated with basic words are encoded in the cortex, creating the first semantic atlas of the brain. The findings, described in the journal Nature, provide an unprecedented view of language and meaning as it plays out on our neural terrain, and could potentially offer a road map for those looking to help patients with certain types of aphasia or other neurological disorders. For a long time, researchers thought about language as a primarily left-hemisphere function that took place in specific spots of the brain, such as Broca's area and Wernicke's area. But those areas aren't associated with understanding language but producing it – speech, in short.