When I was young, I remember taking apart a simple flashlight to understand how it works. It seemed to make sense that if you reduce an object down to its parts, you can then see how it all works together. But that is not always the case: some things in the world have properties that are more than the sum of their parts. Take for instance the ability of water to put out a fire, which cannot be reduced solely to the properties of hydrogen and oxygen.
“This is true also of the mind, which is still often regarded as a collection of unrelated faculties co-existing with each other, but as we progress in our understanding of how the brain works, we are coming to realize that this far from true,” explains Nicolas Bourguignon, a researcher at the Royal Military Academy in Belgium. “Somehow things combined yield new things with entirely different features – a phenomenon called ‘emergence.’”
In a new paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Bourguignon and Salvatore Lo Bue make a case for language as an emergent property of the brain. They wrote: “In considering the implications it has in our understanding of the place of language within the broader infrastructure of human behavior, this novel perspective aims to move the neurobiology of language forward in a new era of…cognitive neuroscience.”
I spoke with Bourguignon to learn more about the paper, his interest in language, and new trends in understanding the neurobiology of language.
CNS: Why do you study the neurobiology of language?
Bourguignon: For me it’s all about the love of language and all that connects with it: literature, thought, communication and culture. I’ve nurtured this love for as long as I can remember. And I wasn’t really good at or that interested in other topics at school, so working with language was the only natural way to go. Ironically enough it made me land jobs I wouldn’t have thought a second I would get. I started studying English and German and now work as a researcher in military psychology. Pretty different planets!
Like any subject matter in the cognitive sciences, their relevance ultimately boils down to knowing a bit more everyday about what makes us human. Plus doing science is a good intellectual exercise overall, a way to stay in the zone.
CNS: What new insights were you seeking with the new paper?
Bourguignon: The cognitive neuroscience of language has typically been split between proponents of a modular approach on the one hand, who believe that language is seated in specially dedicated areas of the brain, and those embracing a more integrated approach on the other, whereby language “emerges” as the product of interactions between different brain regions involved in other mental operations. These different positions have significant implications regarding the way we see language in relation with the rest of human cognition.
At its core, our paper contends that the way the existing neurocognitive evidence on language in the brain is regarded as supporting one or the other position largely depends on the way “language” itself is conceptualized, which in turn determines the way it is investigated empirically. We argue for a broad, seemingly simplistic, yet unbiased, conception of language as “any piece of information that can be verbalized.” Combined with recent knowledge about how cognition could emerge from interactions between neural populations and evidence for a causal relation between language and human behavior, this approach yields an emergentist theory of language in the brain that has just as much merit as its modular counterpart, with interesting vistas for novel and as yet untested hypotheses.
CNS: In your review of the literature and work on this model, what were you most excited to find?
Bourguignon: The very notion that language cannot be pinpointed in a neatly delineated area or network of the brain will be surprising to some people, and unpalatable to others. What interests me most in this work is that simple changes in the way we define language can radically alter the way we conceive of its functional anatomic organization and study it. Another important aspect of this work, which had been brilliantly articulated in a previous paper by John Krakauer and his colleagues, is that neuroscientific understanding of a mental phenomenon absolutely cannot be considered in the absence of behavioral data.
CNS: Were there any novel approaches you found that are promising for future work in this area?
Bourguignon: Yes. Synergistic analyses of neurophysiological data are new and very exciting developments in the study of the mind and brain. If they withstand inquiry, they might steer cognitive neuroscience in a radically new direction. Kudos to the geniuses who developed them.
CNS: What’s next for this line of work?
Bourguignon: Test our theory, refine it, deepen it, change it… Maybe put it in the trash if it turns out not to work.
The human mind is so complex that it is hard to approach it with complete objectivity. There are so many ways in which it can be legitimately approached. This is a fact we all have to live with, including us professional cognitive neuroscientists. Remembering it every once in a while is a way to keep a sober and open mind on what we do.
-Lisa M.P. Munoz
