[Source: Science Daily]

When you look at a picture of a mug, the neurons that store your memory of what a mug is begin firing. But it’s not a pinpoint process; a host of neurons that code for related ideas and items — bowl, coffee, spoon, plate, breakfast — are activated as well. How your brain narrows down this smorgasbord of related concepts to the one word you’re truly seeking is a complicated and poorly understood cognitive task. A new study led by San Diego State University neuroscientist Stephanie Ries, of the School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, delved into this question by measuring the brain’s cortical activity and found that wide, overlapping swaths of the brain work in parallel to retrieve the correct word from memory.

Most adults can quickly and effortlessly recall as many as 100,000 regularly used words when prompted, but how the brain accomplishes this has long boggled scientists. How does the brain nearly always find the needle in the haystack? Previous work has revealed that the brain organizes ideas and words into semantically related clusters. When trying to recall a specific word, the brain activates its cluster, significantly reducing the size of the haystack.

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