Our eyes may be our window to the world, but how do we make
sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at
the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to
put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. They have
created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings.
The result — achieved through computational models of brain
imaging data collected while the subjects watched hours of movie clips — is
what researchers call “a continuous semantic space.”