AS LOVERS know, a bunch of flowers speaks volumes. Maybe that’s because the brain makes sense of such gestures in the same way that it processes language.
Kristian Tylén from the University of Southern Denmark in Odense and colleagues wanted to know which part of the brain was used to understand the meaning behind items placed in a symbolic manner. They used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers as they viewed pictures of everyday objects arranged to communicate meaning, such as flowers left on a doorstep, followed by the same objects in less meaningful settings, such as…
