Dictionaries tend to organise words alphabetically, but that is not how the human brain stores them. In our minds, words are grouped thematically, meaning they are categorised (1)---- their deeper meaning in relation to a specific image, topic, or idea. To investigate how this happens, a team at a European university has mapped the brain's 'conceptual network', which relies on distinct categories (2)---- the relationships between words and their associated meanings. The research team gathered their data by scanning the brains of twelve volunteers while they read a series of short stories, then compared word meanings against activity patterns in specific brain regions. The group was able to (3)---- fifteen categories of words – concepts such as number, direction, sound, and mood – that appeared to activate over 80 distinct brain regions in varying ways. With a model like this, the team claims it may eventually be possible to build a device that can infer what a person is thinking (4)---- careful analysis of real-time brain scans as they read or speak. (5)----, the researchers suggest that this brain map of language could help us better understand how thought itself is structured.