LOS ANGELES, June 1 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they found the part of the brain responsible for a key survival trait: our ability to comprehend a new situation in a fraction of a second.
The brain's ability to understand a whole scene -- even one never previously encountered -- on the fly "gives us an enormous edge on an organism that would have to look at objects one by one and slowly add them up," Irving Biederman, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, said.
Researchers say the key is the brain's ability to process the interacting objects that comprise a scene more quickly than unrelated objects, a USC release reported Tuesday.
Previous research had established the existence of a so-called "scene-facilitation effect," but the location of the part of the brain responsible for the effect remained a mystery.
Biederman and Jiye G. Kim, a doctoral student in Biederman's lab, along with colleagues in china, set out to uncover that location.
Using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, they found the source of the effect was lateral occipital cortex, a portion of the brain's visual processing center located between the ear and the back of the skull.
This study is the latest in an ongoing effort by Biederman and Kim to unlock the complex way in which the brain processes visual experience with the goal, Biederman said, of understanding "how we get mind from brain."
