Brain May Rely On Computer-Like Mechanism Our brains give us the remarkable ability to make sense of situations we've never encountered before -- a familiar person in an unfamiliar place, for example, or a coworker in a different job role -- but the mechanism our brains use to accomplish this has been a longstanding mystery of neuroscience. 13920401000077_photoi.jpg - 66.90 Kb Now, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have demonstrated that our brains could process these new situations by relying on a method similar to the "pointer" system used by computers. "Pointers" are used to tell a computer where to look for information stored elsewhere in the system to replace a variable. For the study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research team relied on sentences with words used in unique ways to test the brain's ability to understand the role familiar words play in a sentence even when those words are used in unfamiliar, and ev