Scientists have revealed the peculiarities of the brain's work in the perception of solid and liquid materials

The human brain uses different parts of the visual cortex to analyze solid objects and fluid materials. This is stated in a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published in the journal Popular Science, which was reviewed by Izvestia on August 13.

Neuroscientists have established that the ventral visual pathway, responsible for recognizing shapes and three-dimensional objects, and the dorsal visual pathway, involved in assessing the physical properties of objects, have specialized areas. Some of them react more actively to solid materials such as stones or balls, while others react more actively to liquids and loose substances such as water or sand. According to the study's author, Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, interacting with different types of materials requires different approaches.

"With a rigid object, you can pick it up or grab it, while with a liquid or sticky substance, you'll probably have to use a tool to handle it," she said.

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The co-author of the work, cognitive neuroscientist Vivian Paulun, noted that scientists had not previously studied the brain's perception of liquids and bulk materials. To fill this gap, a team of researchers has created more than 100 videos depicting various interactions of materials with the environment, from falling and flowing to bouncing and overflowing. The participants in the experiment watched these videos while their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

The results showed that both the ventral and dorsal visual pathways are activated when observing different types of materials, but each of them has areas that respond selectively to either solid or fluid.

"Both the ventral and dorsal visual pathways seem to have this division, with one part reacting more strongly to 'things' and the other reacting more strongly to 'materials,'" Paulun explained, adding that this division had previously gone unnoticed because no such studies had been conducted.

Scientists compared this process to graphics engines in video games, where solid objects are represented as a three—dimensional grid, and liquids as a collection of particles. According to them, such separation may be an evolutionary mechanism that helps the brain plan its interaction with the environment.

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