People's Brains Now Process Texts Almost as Quickly as Pictures

October 25, 2024

Texts deliver rapid-fire messages, but a new study indicates human brains can keep up with the barrage.

The brain can detect the basic linguistic structure of a brief sentence in roughly 150 milliseconds -- about the speed of a blink of an eye, researchers report.

“Our experiments reveal that the brain’s language comprehension system may be able to perceive language similarly to visual scenes, whose essence can be grasped quickly from a single glance,” said lead researcher Liina Pylkkanen, a professor in New York University’s Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology.

In essence, text or images can be taken in and processed much more quickly than anything someone might say to a person, researchers said.

“The human brain’s processing capacity for language may be much faster than what we might think,” Pylkkanen said in a university news release. “In the amount of time it takes to hear one syllable, the brain can actually detect the structure of a short sentence.”

The rise of email, followed by texts and social media, has promoted a quick and fragmented consumption of information, researchers said. Short messages are constantly flashing at people through phone notifications and online platforms.

“This shift has made it clear that our brains not only have the ability to instinctively process rapid messages, but can also make snap decisions based on them -- like whether to keep or delete an email or how to respond to a brief social media update,” Pylkkanen explained.

“But how well do we really understand these quick messages and how do our brains manage them?” Pylkkanen pondered. “The fact that our brains can, at least in some way, grasp the meaning of these fast messages from just a single glance may reveal something fundamental about the processing potential of the language system.”

In a series of experiments, researchers measured brain activity while participants read sets of words that were either actual sentence fragments (“nurses clean wounds”) or just lists of nouns (“heart lungs livers”).

The studies, published Oct. 23 in the journal Science Advances and the Journal of Neuroscience, showed that the region of the brain used for language comprehension, the left temporal cortex, can distinguish between simple three-word sentences and unstructured word lists as quickly as 130 milliseconds after seeing either.

“This speed suggests that at-a-glance sentence comprehension may resemble the rapid perception of a visual scene rather than the slower, step-by-step process we associate with spoken language,” Pylkkanen said. “In the amount of time that it takes one to hear one syllable, the brain can actually detect the structure of a three-word sentence.”

The left temporal cortex was able to rapidly identify sentence fragments even when they contained a grammar error like “nurses cleans wounds” or didn’t seem to make any sense, researchers noted.

“This suggests that the signals reflect the detection of basic phrase structure, but not necessarily other aspects of the grammar or meaning,” said lead researcher Jacqueline Fallon, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado.

Related research also showed that the brain also can rapidly correct for small errors in phrase structure, such as swapping two adjacent words to say “all are cats nice.”

Such an error caused a drop in the brain’s rapid response, but the brain appears to “correct” these sort of mistakes within 400 milliseconds and process the fragment as if it were fully grammatical, said New York University graduate student Nigel Flower.

“This suggests that the brain not only quickly recognizes phrase structure but also automatically corrects small mistakes,” Flower said in an NYU news release. “This explains why readers often miss minor errors—their brains have already corrected them internally.”

More information

The Society for Neuroscience has more on the foundations on language processing.

SOURCE: New York University, news release, Oct. 23, 2024

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