Numbers in the Human Brain

 描述（由申请人提供）：人类文明的标志是以数字符号的形式传达大小，时间和空间。人类学习说某种语言，并根据他们所生活的文化阅读其符号。众所周知，所有的大脑在视觉系统中都有专门的神经元群，通过教育和文化，这些神经元群被修剪以识别这些视觉符号，并能够将它们馈送到大脑的特定网络，在那里它们被处理。大脑视觉系统中神经元群体的存在选择性地对数字做出反应，这是一个有趣的例子，说明了养育如何影响我们的天性，即，文化体验和教育如何改变大脑的生物功能。然而，对于这些专门的神经元群体在视觉系统中的运作方式以及语言和数字网络的运作方式，人们知之甚少。拟议的工作将是第一个多模式方法，结合联合收割机直接记录从人脑表面（皮层电图，ECoG），以及造成可逆的功能扰动，由电脑刺激（EBS）。拟议的工作旨在提供一个全面的地图的位置和功能特性和连接的腹侧颞叶皮层（VTC）的专门领域的数字（即，视觉数字区（VNA）。最后，我们建议研究当人类受试者学习将外国符号与其分类和语义身份相关联时，VTC中的神经元群体活动如何变化。我们希望并相信，我们的新的多模态方法将提供前所未有的时空信息，以澄清有关VTC子区域的功能贡献如何在人脑中处理的悬而未决的问题。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Human civilizations are hallmarked by communicating magnitude, time, and space in the form of numeral symbols. Humans learn to speak a certain language and read its symbols depending on the culture they live in. All brains are known to have specialized group of neuronal populations in the visual system that, through education and culture, are pruned to recognize these visual symbols, and be able to feed them to specific networks of the brain where they are processed. The existence of neuronal populations in the brain's visual system to respond selectively to numerals is a fascinating example of how nurture affects our nature, i.e., how cultural experience and education change the brain's biological function. Yet, relatively little is known about the way these specialized populations of neurons operate in the visual system and with the networks of language and numerosity. The proposed work will be the first multimodal approach to combine direct recordings from the surface of the human brain (electrocorticography, ECoG) as well as causing reversible functional perturbations by electrical brain stimulation (EBS). The proposed work aims to provide a comprehensive map of the location and functional properties and connectivity of the specialized areas of the ventral temporal cortex (VTC) for numerals (i.e., visual numeral area (VNA). Lastly, we propose to study how the neuronal population activities change in the VTC when human subjects learn to associate foreign symbols with their categorical and semantic identities. We are hopeful and confident that our novel multimodal approach will provide unprecedented spatiotemporal information to clarify the outstanding questions about the functional contributions of VTC subregions to how numbers are processed in the human brain.