HEALTH
Our brains can understand written sentences in the ‘blink of an eye’
WORDS BEN TURNER
Human brains can discern the basic structures of written language from
a single glance, enabling us to quickly consume the torrent of information fed to us by smartphones, a new study finds. By measuring the brain activity of 36 volunteers, scientists found that people can detect basic sentence structures in as little as 125 milliseconds, or about the speed of a blink of an eye. This means that people can process words as quickly as we comprehend visual scenes, a skill that enables us to continually observe and navigate the world around us. The new finding, published 23 October in the journal
Science Advances,
could help reveal key clues about how our brains encode language, the researchers said.