Stuff and Brains Part 2: How Tools Come In Handy

298571748_c18ca5d78b_bHumans learn about objects by exploring them. I once described how my infant daughter explored objects, discovering their uses and properties through trial and error, observation, and plenty of dead ends. Her modest experiments illustrated a more universal truth: that from our earliest moments, our experience with objects in the world is fundamentally tied to our senses, to the ways we physically interact with them, and to the purposes they serve.

Last week I wrote about object-selective cortex, the part of visual cortex that lets us recognize people and stuff. I mentioned that this swath of the brain is speckled with several areas that specialize in processing certain object classes (e.g., faces, bodies, and scenes). If you consider object-selective cortex as a whole, you find that these specialized areas fit within a broader organization based on whether the to-be-recognized object is animate (a living, moving thing) or, if not, whether it’s large or small. While this may sound like a wacky way to divvy up object recognition, I mentioned some plausible reasons why your brain might map objects this way.

That’s the big-picture view. But what happens if we zoom in and explore one little bit of object-selective cortex in detail? Would we see a meaningful organization at this scale too? The answer, dear reader, is yes. In fact, this type of micro-organization can tell us volumes about how we recognize, understand, and use the objects around us.

For a beautiful example, let’s travel to the extrastriate body area (EBA).* The EBA is involved in visually recognizing bodies. Your EBA is active when you see a human body, regardless of whether the body is clothed or unclothed. It’s also active when you see parts of a body or even (to a lesser degree) when you see abstract body representations like stick figures. In 2010, scientists from Northumbria University used fMRI to ‘zoom in’ on the EBA in the left hemisphere. The team found that a chunk of the left EBA is specifically interested in pictures of hands, as opposed to other parts of the body. In essence, they found a micro-organization within the EBA, segregating hands from other body parts.

Before we talk more about hands, let’s visit another object-selective area in the same vicinity: the tool-selective area on the middle temporal gyrus. No kidding, your visual cortex has areas devoted to tools! The tool area on the middle temporal gyrus is engaged when you see a picture of a tool, be it a hammer, a stapler, or a fork. Patients with brain damage in this region tend to have trouble recalling information about the actions paired with common tools. But what counts as a tool for this region? One research group tried to answer this question by training adult subjects to use unfamiliar objects as tools. Using fMRI, the group showed that pictures of these objects activated the tool area after but not before training. In short, the brain dynamically reorganizes object recognition, or at least tool recognition, based on new experiences with objects.

But the story doesn’t end there. In 2012, the same group that discovered the hand area reported another find: that the hand area and the tool area overlap – a lot. What does this overlap mean? In essence, the same spot of cortex is active both when you see a hand and when you see a screwdriver or a pair of scissors. Notice that this goes against the broad divisions mentioned in my last post, since hands are animate and screwdrivers are not. Here, scale makes all the difference. When you zoom out, you see that object-selective cortex is broadly divvied up based on object animacy and size, but these divisions aren’t absolute and ubiquitous. Up close, you can find tiny bits of cortex that buck the trend, each with its own idiosyncratic combination of preferences.

Screen Shot 2013-10-24 at 3.39.27 PM

Figure from Bracci et al, 2012, showing the overlap of hand and tool areas in the left hemispheres of all but one of their subjects. Each slice represents the overlap (shown in cyan) in a different subject.

While each local mix of preferences may be idiosyncratic, it is probably not accidental. To save space and speed up reactions, brain organization is very well optimized. Chances are good that hands and tools overlap in the brain for a reason. But what might that reason be? It might stem from the fact that hands are intimately linked with tools in your visual experience. Since hands grip tools, you tend to see them together. You also tend to see faces and bodies together (that is, unless you’re watching a horror film.) And as it turns out, the face area and the body area on the bottom temporal surface of the right hemisphere appear to partially overlap as well. Could this be because faces and bodies, like hands and tools, tend to co-occur in our visual experience? It’s possible. Humans are quite sensitive to the statistical properties of our experience with objects.

But there’s another, quite different explanation for why faces overlap with bodies and tools overlap with hands in object-selective cortex. Brain organization tends to be dictated by where information needs to go next. (In essence, how the information will be used). The 2012 paper presents evidence that the overlapping hand/tool area is communicating with other areas of the brain that guide object-directed actions. The paper also cites another fMRI study that suggests the overlapping face and body areas in the right hemisphere communicate with parts of the brain involved in social interactions. In short, recognizing either a face or a body provides information that the social regions in your brain may need, while visual information about hands or tools may be invaluable when it comes time for reaching, grabbing, lifting, or stapling stuff.

Hands and tools. Faces and bodies. These are just a small sample of the many kinds of objects and creatures we see every day of our lives. Just imagine if we knew the micro-organization of every millimeter of object-selective cortex. Now that would be a map, one you started shaping from your earliest days on this earth. It would be a record of your lifetime of adventures with people and with stuff.

______

*Is it just me or does this post seem like an episode of The Magic School Bus?

Photo credits

Hands photo: Carmen Maria on Flickr

Brain images: Bracci et al, 2012 in The Journal of Neurophysiology

Bracci S, Cavina-Pratesi C, Ietswaart M, Caramazza A, & Peelen MV (2012). Closely overlapping responses to tools and hands in left lateral occipitotemporal cortex. Journal of neurophysiology, 107 (5), 1443-56 PMID: 22131379

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