Numbers in the Human Brain

 描述(申请人提供)：人类文明的特点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阅读它的符号，这取决于他们生活的文化。众所周知，所有大脑在视觉系统中都有一组专门的神经元群体，通过教育和文化，这些群体被修剪成能够识别这些视觉符号，并能够将它们提供给大脑的特定网络，在那里它们被处理。大脑视觉系统中存在对数字做出选择性反应的神经元群体，这是一个有趣的例子，说明了后天养成如何影响我们的天性，即文化经历和教育如何改变大脑的生物功能。然而，人们对这些特殊的神经元群体在视觉系统以及语言和数字网络中的运作方式知之甚少。这项拟议的工作将是第一个将来自人脑表面的直接记录(皮质脑电，ECoG)以及通过电刺激(EBS)引起可逆功能扰动的多模式方法结合在一起。这项拟议的工作旨在提供一个全面的数字腹侧颞叶皮质(VTC)专门区域(即视觉数字区域(VNA))的位置、功能特性和连接的地图。最后，我们建议研究当人类被试学习将外来符号与其范畴和语义身份联系起来时，VTC内神经元群体活动的变化。我们希望并相信，我们的新的多模式方法将提供前所未有的时空信息，以澄清关于VTC亚区对人脑如何处理数字的功能贡献的悬而未决的问题。

 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.