Abstract
Cognitive neuroscience methods can identify the fMRI-measured neural representation of familiar individual concepts, such as apple, and decompose them into meaningful neural and semantic components. This approach was applied here to determine the neural representations and underlying dimensions of representation of far more abstract physics concepts related to matter and energy, such as fermion and dark matter, in the brains of 10 Carnegie Mellon physics faculty members who thought about the main properties of each of the concepts. One novel dimension coded the measurability vs. immeasurability of a concept. Another novel dimension of representation evoked particularly by post-classical concepts was associated with four types of cognitive processes, each linked to particular brain regions: (1) Reasoning about intangibles, taking into account their separation from direct experience and observability; (2) Assessing consilience with other, firmer knowledge; (3) Causal reasoning about relations that are not apparent or observable; and (4) Knowledge management of a large knowledge organization consisting of a multi-level structure of other concepts. Two other underlying dimensions, previously found in physics students, periodicity, and mathematical formulation, were also present in this faculty sample. The data were analyzed using factor analysis of stably responding voxels, a Gaussian-naïve Bayes machine-learning classification of the activation patterns associated with each concept, and a regression model that predicted activation patterns associated with each concept based on independent ratings of the dimensions of the concepts. The findings indicate that the human brain systematically organizes novel scientific concepts in terms of new dimensions of neural representation.
Highlights
Physics is the fundamental science that studies the interactions of matter and energy across all scales of space and time
A neutrino has both a classical aspect, being a particle like any other, flying through space with mass and momentum, but at the same time it has oscillatory quantum aspects that are unexplainable classically. Using this approach of factor analyzing the neural signatures of physics concepts, we demonstrate that there are four describable factors underlying the neural representations of both classical and post-classical physics concepts, constituting a kind of orthogonal vector basis of the neural representations
We show that (a) each physics concept has a distinct associated activation pattern that can be accurately identified by a statistical classifier, (b) that the activation patterns for each concept are measurably common across scientists, (c) that the activation pattern for a concept that has been excluded from the modeling of the other 44 concepts can be accurately predicted by a model that uses expert behavioral ratings of the concept with respect to the postulated underlying dimensions, and (d) that the faculty’s representations of basic physics concepts can be reliably distinguished from those of students
Summary
Physics is the fundamental science that studies the interactions of matter and energy across all scales of space and time. While basic physics concepts such as velocity and torque have perceptual counterparts that can provide a neural basis for their representation, it is unclear how the brain has accommodated to represent non-intuitive or counter-intuitive concepts involving the subatomic, quantum, and cosmological realms. We characterize the representation of the most advanced scientific concepts in the field of physics, as they occur in the brains of university faculty physicists. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain function has enabled the study of how various types of mundane, everyday concepts are neurally and cognitively represented in the human brain. We apply this approach to understanding the underlying neural and semantic organization of highly abstract contemporary scientific concepts in the brains of active physicists
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