This image illustrates how the study participants learned about the habitat and the diet of eight animals, such as the cytar (not its real zoological name). The set of habitat brain regions (A-green) and diet (B-red and blue) regions where the new knowledge was stored. (L refers to left hemisphere of the brain.) Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University

Cutting-edge brain imaging technology has offered the first glimpse into how new concepts develop in the human brain.

The research, carried out at Carnegie Mellon University and published in Human Brain Mapping, involved teaching people a new concept and observing how it was coded in the same areas of the brain through neural representations.


The "olinguito" -- a largely fruit-eating carnivore species that lives in rainforest treetops, newly discovered in 2013 -- was initially used as a concept. Marcel Just, a professor of cognitive neuroscience in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, commented: "When people learned that the olinguito eats mainly fruit instead of meat, a region of their left inferior frontal gyrus -- as well as several other areas -- stored the new information according to its own code."

The findings revealed that this new knowledge of the olinguito was encoded in exactly the same parts of the brain by everyone who learned it, indicating that the brain may operate its own kind of universal filing system.

In the latest research, 16 study participants were taught information about the diet and dwelling habits of eight extinct animals, in order to study the growth of the neural representations of these concepts in their brains. Drawing on the previous findings, the team predicted where this new knowledge would be stored.

Just and Andrew Bauer, lead author of the study, then used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor these concepts emerging in the brain, and found that each new concept developed its own "unique activation signature". This allowed a computer program to effectively work out which of the eight animals a participant was thinking about at any given time -- essentially allowing the scientists to read their minds.


Interestingly, the animals with close similarities (such as habitat) had closely matched activation signatures, and once a property of an animal had been learned, it stayed intact in the brain even after new ones had been taught -- providing a new insight into the neural durability of the things we learn.

Bauer commented: "Each time we learn something, we permanently change our brains in a systematic way. It was exciting to see our study successfully implant the information about extinct animals into the expected locations in the brain's filing system."

It's hoped that the research may be able to help shape future teaching methods in schools, and also give a clearer picture of how knowledge is "lost" as a result of serious brain injuries and conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease.