Research Hit: Our Brains Process Short Messages Instantly
New research shows how quickly the brain identifies structure in sentences - in the blink of an eye
Well, sorry, but isn’t that obvious that we process short messages quickly?!
Yes, that is obvious but what is not obvious is that this seems to happen in about 150 milliseconds which is the blink of any eye lid. Basically we seem to process short messages as a complete unit in a fraction of a second.
Oh wow, so how does our brain do that?
That is the key question that Jacqueline Fallon and Liina Pylkkäne of New York University asked.
First of they conducted various experiments looking at language processing by flashing up words in random order or short sentences. They then complemented this with measuring brain activity using magnetoencephalography (reading brain signals with magnets) and saw that within as little as 130 milliseconds after the onset of seeing words the brain is distinguishing between list of words and structured sentences.
That happens in the brain’s left temporal cortex which is associated with language processing (do note that language processing is complex and uses multiple parts of the brain).
That’s really quick but is this processing the whole sentence?
Well, no, it points to separating structure from randomness only, but nevertheless it’s exceptionally quick. And it suggests the ability to see sentences or messages as a whole rather than a combination of words and grammar. Much like when we see a picture.
So we could be processing sentences as units of language - in one chunk?
Yes, I come from language teaching and decades ago there was a discussion and movement towards language as “chunks” rather than complex grammatical structures. This kind of supports this and is likely for rapid fire understanding - we are likely processing short sentence or messages, as long as they aren’t unusual, in one fell swoop.
This actually would also fall in line with other research that has shown how predictive our brains actually are.
But isn’t this a learned skill with the advent of technologies such as text messaging and social media apps?
Yes, the authors do assume that this is speeding up the process with so many of us used to getting short snippets of text constantly that we have also trained ourselves to process these snippets instantly.
Not a bad thing but it also comes with dangers of interpreting a message too quickly or not really reading it through and processing it.
Reference
Jacqueline Fallon, Liina Pylkkänen.
Language at a glance: How our brains grasp linguistic structure from parallel visual input.
Science Advances, 2024; 10 (43)
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr9951