Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), neuroscientists have identified several regions of the brain that are responsible for processing language. However, discovering the specific functions of neurons in those regions has proven difficult because fMRI, which measures changes in blood flow, doesn’t have high enough resolution to reveal what small populations of neurons are doing. Now, using a more precise technique that involves recording electrical activity directly from the brain, MIT neuroscientists have identified different clusters of neurons that appear to process different amounts of linguistic context. These “temporal windows” range from just one word up to about six words.

In 1994, Florida jewelry designer Diana Duyser discovered what she believed to be the Virgin Mary’s image in a grilled cheese sandwich, which she preserved and later auctioned for $28,000. But how much do we really understand about pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing faces and patterns in objects when they aren’t really there? 

A new study from the MIT delves into this phenomenon, introducing an extensive, human-labeled dataset of 5,000 pareidolic images, far surpassing previous collections. Using this dataset, the team discovered several surprising results about the differences between human and machine perception, and how the ability to see faces in a slice of toast might have saved your distant relatives’ lives.

The idea of electrically stimulating a brain region called the central thalamus has gained traction among researchers and clinicians because it can help arouse subjects from unconscious states induced by traumatic brain injury or anesthesia, and can boost cognition and performance in awake animals. But the method, called CT-DBS, can have a side effect: seizures. A new study by researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) who were testing the method in awake mice quantifies the probability of seizures at different stimulation currents and cautions that they sometimes occurred even at low levels.

“Understanding production and prevalence of this type of seizure activity is important because brain stimulation-based therapies are becoming more widely used,” says co-senior author Emery N. Brown, Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the Center for Brains Minds and Machines (CBMM) at MIT.