Potter books help scientists understand how brain encodes stories

Scientists performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of eight people as they read a chapter of Harry Potter book to understand how brain encode words, grammar, story.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department analyzed the scans, cubic millimeter by cubic millimeter, for every four-word segment of that chapter and discovered first integrated computational model of reading, identifying which parts of the brain are responsible for such subprocesses as parsing sentences, determining the meaning of words and understanding relationships between characters.

Leila Wehbe, a Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department said that the test subjects read Chapter 9 of Sorcerer's Stone, which is about Harry's first flying lesson and it turns out that movement of the characters-such as when they are flying their brooms - is associated with activation in the same brain region that we use to perceive other people's motion. Similarly, the characters in the story are associated with activation in the same brain region we use to process other people's intentions.

The study was published in the online journal PLOS ONE.