Word Association Networks in the Human Brain
There has a lot of study of word association in the human brain. This is part of the larger question of looking into how concepts are stored in our brain. In particular, studies have shown that words in our brains have some sort of connections between conceptually similar words. The Human Brain Cloud project seeks to gain an idea of typical associations in the brain between different words, and displays the same in a graph structure. The site asks users to answer as many “the-first-word-that-comes-into-your-mind” questions as they like, and uses the information to generate a network of word associations that users can explore. The connections are directed. The maker of the site explains that it all started from a single word (volcano) and that it grows on its own. In this sense it is not intended to be an academic exercise, but just an exploration of words and their associations.
Many researchers have taken a more neurologically oriented approach to the study of conceptual relations between thoughts. For instance, researchers at Princeton looked at fMRI scans of the human brain and observed similar activity for words relating to similar concepts. This provides an explanation of word association based on neural structure. The researchers were then able to predict what the person was most likely to be thinking about just by looking at the fMRI scans. According to Matthew Botvinck, an associate professor in the Psychology department and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, the research can be imagined to one day allow us translate brain activity into written output for people unable to communicate otherwise. We can certainly imagine think to type technologies as a massively long-drawn conclusion from this.
http://www.humanbraincloud.com/
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S31/47/31I07/index.xml?section=topstories