The Neuroscience of Advanced Scientific Concepts
Robert A. Mason, Reinhard A. Schumacher, and Marcel A. Just

TL;DR
This study used cognitive neuroscience methods to uncover how the human brain represents complex physics concepts, revealing new neural dimensions related to measurability, reasoning, and knowledge organization.
Contribution
It introduces novel neural dimensions for abstract scientific concepts and demonstrates how the brain systematically organizes complex physics knowledge.
Findings
Identification of a dimension coding measurability vs. immeasurability.
Discovery of a dimension linked to reasoning about intangibles and unobservable relations.
Presence of previously known dimensions like periodicity and mathematical formulation.
Abstract
Cognitive neuroscience methods can identify the fMRI-measured neural representation of familiar individual concepts, such as apple, and decompose them into meaningful neural and semantic components. This approach was applied here to determine the neural representations and underlying dimensions of representation of far more abstract physics concepts related to matter and energy, such as fermion and dark matter, in the brains of 10 Carnegie Mellon physics faculty members who thought about the main properties of each of the concepts. One novel dimension coded the measurability vs. immeasurability of a concept. Another novel dimension of representation evoked particularly by post-classical concepts was associated with four types of cognitive processes, each linked to particular brain regions: (1) Reasoning about intangibles, taking into account their separation from direct experience and…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
