Researchers from Johns Hopkins University say they've identified the brain region responsible for making instinctive, immediate calculations for the movement of physical objects, dubbing it the brain's "physics engine". Interestingly, while we might think of these kinds of physical calculations as largely visual in nature – for example, trying to predict where a basketball might bounce after it hits the rim or backboard – the cerebral region that handles the actual work isn't in the brain's vision centre, but in our action planning areas: the premotor cortex and supplementary motor area. To identify the region in our brain that makes physics-based calculations, Fischer and a team of researchers from MIT had 12 participants look at video of Jenga-style blocks assembled in a tower. While scanning their brain activity via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers asked the participants to predict where they thought the blocks might land if the tower were to collapse. The fMRI results showed that the premotor cortex and the supplementary motor area were the most responsive areas – whereas a simple visual test, in which the participants only had to identify whether the static tower contained more blue or yellow blocks, didn't stimulate activity in their physics engine. http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-found-the-part-of-our-brain-that-actually-gets-physics Paper: http://releases.jhu.edu/2016/08/08/researchers-find-brains-physics-engine/
