Study finds why the brain can quickly process short messages on screens

When scrolling through our phones, we come across short, sharp bursts of text, and now researchers have discovered why the brain is able to quickly process short messages.

According to the findings, the brain detects the basic structure of sentences almost as quickly as it recognizes an image.

The brain identifies the basic linguistic structure of a brief sentence extremely quickly – in about 150 milliseconds, or about the speed of an eye blink – when it is displayed on a screen, the study found.

Research indicates that the brain’s language processing capacity may be much faster than previously thought.

Digital media will see people receiving rapid messages – such as phone notifications and written text on videos – very quickly.

In the new study, researchers looked at whether the brain is able to process these texts as quickly as it can determine the composition of the images that go hand in hand with the use of screens.

The team from New York University (NYU), USA, of linguistics and psychology researchers discovered yes.

Liina Pylkkanen, a professor in the department of linguistics and the department of psychology at NYU who led the research, said: “Our experiments reveal that the brain’s language understanding system may be able to perceive language in a similar way to visual scenes, the essence of which can be quickly grasped from visual scenes. a single look.

“This means that the language processing capacity of the human brain may be much faster than we think – in the time it takes to hear a syllable, the brain can actually detect the structure of a short sentence.”

The researchers conducted a series of experiments, measuring brain activity while people read lists of words that were either grammatical sentences or just lists of nouns on the screen.

They found that the part of the brain responsible for understanding language begins to distinguish simple three-word sentences from lists of unstructured words as quickly as 130 milliseconds after seeing them.

Professor Pylkkanen said: “This speed suggests that immediate sentence comprehension may resemble quickly perceiving a visual scene, rather than the slower, step-by-step process we associate with spoken language.

“In the time it takes to hear a syllable, the brain can actually detect the structure of a three-word sentence.”

The findings are published in the journal Science Advances.