“wife”, “husband”, “children”, “parents”. Each word is represented by more than one spot because words tend to have several meanings. One part of the brain, for example, reliably responds to the word “top”, along with other words that describe clothing. But, the word “top” activates many other regions. One of them responds to numbers and measurements, another to buildings and places. The scientists have created an interactive website where the public can explore the brain atlas. Strikingly, the brain atlases were similar for all the participants, suggesting that their brains organized the meanings of words in the same way. The scientists only scanned five men and two women, however. All are native English speakers and two are authors of the study published in Nature. It is highly possible that people from different backgrounds and cultures will have different semantic brain atlases. Armed with the atlas, researchers can now piece together the brain networks that represent wildly different concepts, from numbers to murder and religion. “The idea of murder is represented a lot in the brain,” Gallant said. Using the same data, the group has begun work on new atlases that show how the brain holds information on other aspects of language, from phonemes to syntax. A brain atlas for narrative structure has so far proved elusive, however. “Every time we