• Question: What do your practical experiments consist of when thinking about the brain??

    Asked by muncesop to Susanna, Michael, James, Ben, Jen on 12 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by jamaicanbacon.
    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I try to understand how reading words is affected when it’s possible to read more than one word at once. For example, if I asked you if the word ‘proof’ was related to ‘house’ you’d probably say no, and you’d be right to! BUT if you look at the word ‘proof’ you’ll notice that inside it it the word ‘roof’ which definitely is related to the word ‘house’. It turns out that our brain is so clever that when we read we not only read the whole word, but all the words that might be buried inside it too!

      I’ve also done some interesting experiments measuring how peoples eyes get distracted by pictures with a similar meaning, for example showing them pictures of a tree, a dog, a cat and a house, and watching their eyes try to decide between the dog and cat. The brain is actually very good at reading words and naming pictures extremely quickly, but sometimes makes mistakes when two things are ‘related’ by meaning in our minds, we almost get a little confused by it!

      This research is important for people with dyslexia who might well read several words in every word or confuse words, and trying to understand how this happens may help us develop ways of printing or reading words that can stop this happening. Dyslexia affects an awful lot of people and I hope it can help in some way. It’s also possible that this can help us understand where in the brain these words are thought of which can help us understand how brain damage affects reading, or whether brain surgery is going to stop someone from being able to read.

    • Photo: James Stovold

      James Stovold answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Hi muncesop, jamaicanbacon,

      My practical experiments are based around whether robots can perform certain tasks, without being told to do so — they have to make decisions on their own, and work out that they need to work together to solve a problem. The robots will have an artificial brain that controls how they move and how they communicate. This means that they can learn and can remember what they have done before, just like animals can do (including humans).

      What this means is that the models of the brain we are using are more likely to be accurate models of what is going on in the real brain, so we can use the robots to test our ideas about the brain, and at the same time we can build robot controllers that can work better by using inspiration from the brain.

      James

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