Repurposing an ancient brain for modern physics

Functional MRI (fMRI) detects the seconds-long rushes of oxygenated blood to areas of the brain that are engaged with whatever the subject is thinking or doing at the time. The technique is being increasingly used to develop semantic models—how the concept of, say, an object that we see or an emotion that we feel is represented neurally in the brain. Robert Mason and Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon University now extend those studies to physics concepts. Momentum, entropy, magnetic field, and other abstract concepts are qualitatively different from concrete nouns, action verbs, and numbers, and aren’t what the brain was built for. The researchers’ study focused on nine right-handed participants, all upperclassmen or graduate students in physics or engineering. The individuals first were asked to list two or three properties to describe each of 30 physics terms; “velocity” properties, for example, might include “vector” and “motion.” Next came the scans,...