Sydney M. Lamb PATHWAYS OF THE BRAIN The Neurocognitive Basis of Language

The brain, our organ of knowledge and abilities, enables us to instantly recognize a face in a crowd, to converse about anything we experience or imagine, to form thoughts and develop new ideas, to understand words coming rapidly in conversation. How does it manage all this? How does it acquire and represent such abundant information while also enabling such rapid access to individual words and their meanings?

PATHWAYS OF THE BRAIN builds a theory to answer such questions. From findings of linguistics plus evidence overlooked in earlier investigations, it develops a series of hypotheses about the structure and operation of the mind's linguistic system, demonstrating how knowledge can be represented in the connectivity of a vast network in which thousands of locations can be active in parallel. But such a theory raises further questions: How can such widely distributed information be coordinated? How is it learned? How much of the structure is innate?

PATHWAYS OF THE BRAIN proposes answers and then tests them against what is known about the brain. This stage of the exploration finds that virtually all of the hypotheses are confirmed or are consistent with the findings of neuroscience.