CURRENT EVENTS

Gabrielle Di Bernardo
7th grade
Science
17/1/2015

Harry Potter Reveals Secrets of the Brain

People sometimes describe reading as watching a movie in your head. Scientists have long wondered what creates such vivid images, and/or experiences out of simply reading a string of letters. A recent study evaluated all levels of reading, from word length and order, to plot, character, and even emotion. Its results reveal some of the ways our brains turn these words into such images. Computer Scientists Leila Whebe, and Tom Mitchell led the new study (each of them out of Carnegie Melon.) To test the model they recruited people who had read, or watched the movies of
Harry Potter
By J.K Rowling. They had chosen the series because of how many people had seen/read it. The researchers chose chapter 9 from
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
. (The chapter describes Harry’s first flying lesson.) The scientists then identified each word of the selected chapter as having at least one of 195 different features. These included character names, emotions and movements. They also included pronouns, verbs and other features of grammar. Next, they scanned the brain of the person reading Chapter Nine using an MRI. MRI machines uses a strong magnetic field to monitor blood flow in the brain, brain areas consume more oxygen as they become active. So blood flows increase in those areas as they supply the needed oxygen. Wehbe and her team tracked changes in that blood flow as people read. After tweaking their computer model, the researchers found it to be remarkably accurate. They could predict which of two passages people were reading simply by analyzing their brain activity. And those predictions were right three times in every four. Wehbe notes that the model could be used to study how the brain changes as we learn to read. Perhaps we use regions of the brain differently as we become more experienced, she says.