Research Hit: The Sentences that Activate or Deactivate your Brain

How certain sentences ramp up activity in the brain's language processing hubs

Well, some people send me to sleep is that what you’re talking about?

We’re not talking about boredom (but that could be related), rather how sentences activate the brain in different ways.

But doesn’t each sentence activate the brain in different ways?

Of course, each word can trigger a host of reactions in the brain - particularly those that relate to senses or strong emotional cues. But that is not what this research is about, and having done a lot of work in communication skills in business, this is one that I found fascinating.

Greta Tuckute and colleagues of MIT have done an amazing study which involved using volunteers to read and process sentences while in a brain scanner and with the help of artificial networks to analyse this and analyse the way in which thousands of sentences activate language networks - and which sentences activate this the most or the least.

Sounds impressive and what did they find?