Using Harry Potter conjures up new way to study the brain

Reading about Harry Potter's adventures learning to fly his broomstick activates some of the same regions in the brain we use to perceive real people's actions and intentions.

Scientists who peeked into the brains of people caught up in a good book emerged with maps of what a healthy brain does as it reads.

The research published by the journal PLoS One has implications for studying reading disorders or recovery from a stroke. The team from Carnegie Mellon University was pleasantly surprised that the experiment using a section of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" worked.

Most neuroscientists painstakingly have tracked how the brain processes a single word or sentence, looking for clues to language development or dyslexia by focusing on one aspect of reading at a time. But reading a story requires multiple systems working at once: recognizing how letters form a word, knowing the definitions and grammar, keeping up with the characters' relationships and the plot twists.

Measuring all that activity is remarkable, said Georgetown University neuroscientist Guinevere Eden, who helped pioneer brain-scanning studies of dyslexia but wasn't involved in the new work.

"For the first time in history, we can do things like have you read a story and watch where in your brain the neural activity is happening," said senior author Tom Mitchell, director of Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department. "Not just where are the neurons firing, but what information is being coded by those different neurons."

Researchers spotted some complex interactions. For example, the brain region that processes the characters' point of view is the one we use to perceive intentions behind real people's actions, said lead researcher Leila Wehbe, a Ph.D. student. A region that we use to visually interpret other people's emotions helps decipher characters' emotions.

That suggests we're using pretty high-level brain functions, she said. □