Do different languages light up different neurons for the same concept ? Do clusters of neurons correspond to a certain thought?
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There are sections of the brain that are specialized for certain tasks, for example auditory or visual processing, but concept-based linkages are very person-independent.
Neuron linkages work a little like a kind of sticky RAM. When a concept is learned, it builds connections between existing data units which are stored somewhat randomly. This is one of the reasons why BCI software is so difficult to nail down. In addition to scanner resolution problems, there must be a kind of baseline adaptation that needs to be performed to find what area corresponds to what data per person.
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The brain more or less has a dedicated section(s) used for processing language, regardless of where the language comes from or what order the person learned them. It’s not like, for example, Thai uses one part of the brain and French uses another.
That being said, language is a lot like art. It’s not always the same from person to person, culture to culture, setting to setting. Your brain is a highly capable factory and though there is a main terminal responsible for language it might need to ask for assistance from other parts when trying to determine meaning and pragmatics.
The answer is no. There isn’t any logical correlation between a word and a “concept”, nor is there any logical correlation between a “concept” and neurological activity. There is an *empirical* connection between words and neurons: a specific neuron or set of neurons *in a particular person* can be correlated to a specific word, and certain aspects of that word which might be thought of as relating to some logical “concept” can also have neurological correlations. But “concepts” are intellectual (not neurological) constructs; their existence is effectively *fictional*. The idea of concepts is used as a (supposedly productive) hypothesis about how words, reasoning, neurological activity, and logic work, but the words (and/or other symbols) we use to describe these mythical “concepts” are themselves just words, and don’t have the logical consistency that many people insist they do, could, or should have.
A language is more than a vocabulary (set of words), and includes a grammar (apparent rules for combining the words in sentences) and this (again supposedly logical) correlation of grammar can also be empirically linked to neurological activity, but not logically correlated. When two different words in two distinct languages are said to refer to the same “concept”, this just means that they can be interpreted as meaning the same idea, it does not indicate, let alone prove, that the idea has any logical precision or consistency and is a “concept”.
When trying to think about language, neurology, and reasoning, it is helpful to avoid using the word “concept”. The words “word” and “idea” refer to real things; neither is necessarily logically precise because they are not physical objects. But they are not fictitious the way “concepts” are, so your reasoning will be improved if you think about and choose whichever one fits best in the thought you are trying to convey. If it doesn’t seem to matter whether you use the word “word” or the word “idea”, then use whichever you prefer in the moment. If neither works and you truly believe you need to use the word “concept”, then what you are trying to say is almost certainly false.
Like virtually all questions about the brain, the answer is some flavour of “it depends”. There are areas in the brain that seem to be specialized for language (though, I should note, much of modern neuroscience research is about how these specializations are less extreme than we previously thought) — so, roughly speaking, “all” languages light up neurons mostly in those areas and mostly not in others.
To turn more specifically to your question, studies have been conducted on bilingual subjects aimed at roughly this idea of overlap. This is not my research area, but my understanding is that words expressing the same concept in different languages (“hello” vs. “hola”, or whatever) *do* light up the same neurons^* in native bilingual speakers, but *do not* do so in subjects that acquired the second language later in life^** .
With regard to your second question, we don’t have a great neural definition of what a “thought” is. It is true that if you turn on or off certain neurons in the brain, you can encourage or discourage different types of behaviour, but I don’t know if that counts as a “thought”.
^* Technically, these studies are conducted with a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is not sensitive enough to detect individual neurons. So, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the “representations” of words in the brain across languages do or do not overlap.
^** Also here there is a lot of wiggle room and “it depends”. Intrinsic similarity between the languages themselves, skill, and age all play factors in how much the representations overlap. But as far as ELI5 is concerned, you can mostly be happy with the understanding that if you learned multiple languages early enough in life, to the point where you speak them fluently/natively, they likely target the same neural populations.
Yes, “clusters” of neurons do correspond to certain thoughts and ideas. Really it’s more like patterns of actvitity in specific areas. This has been shown repeatedly in fMRI studies. But it differs from person to person where exactly that information (the neurons associated with a specific idea) is located. There are functional regions in the brain that are shared between most people, for instance, an area for faces, for numbers, for visual and auditory stimuli, etc. Within those regions we have some variability, so maybe the face of your mom is recorded in one spot in the face region of your brain, but in someone else’s brain, the face of your mom might be in a slightly different spot, but still within the face region.
No, different languages do not activate different neurons for the same concept. The same concept will be located in the same place within one individual no matter what language is used. This is difficult to compare between individuals since those concepts can be encoded in slightly different places between two people, but the same words and ideas tend to activate extremely similar locations in the brain in different people, as well.
This is the whole concept behind functional brain imaging like fMRI which seeks to find the conserved locations and pathways that are associated with different cognitive functions.
More complex ideas/concepts are going to light up a more complicated set of areas and the more complex the idea is, the ways in which two different people process it cognitively will differ more. But they are still close enough in most cases to be very comparible as long as the concept is simple.
But within one single individual, changing the language used to express an idea does not change where the memory or neural network is. It may light up a slightly different spot for the word itself, but the meaning is always in the same area.
Yes, I recently read a research article and would love to link it if I can find it again. They took people from several dozen languages and put them in FMRI machines (brain scanners) and showed that the same regions lit up when talking about stuff in all the different languages. I wouldn’t go as far as to say a specific cluster of neurons is sitting there waiting to be responsible for one specific thing though. There are people who have had brain injuries or were just missing sections of their brain, so a different part of their brain stored the information. Your brain is an interconnected web or relating things to other things to think and learn all knew things. When you get down to a small enough size the same cluster of cells isn’t always going to be responsible for the same exact thing.
We can’t image individual neurons, and anyway what’s involved here are neuronal linkages – the web of connections, some weak, some strong, that connect a ‘word’ (sound, meaning, symbolic representation – each located separately) to other ‘words’. Languages are not separate from culture (that being short-hand for the shared mental picture of the world), and that’s never quite the same from one person to another. The picture we are getting is that a brain is a constantly active thing, – not so much ‘storing (like a computer) as ‘doing’.
In terms of the question – cultures connect things differently, and that is surely reflected in the brain, but not at a level we can see in detail. The neurologist Iain McGilchrist argues that some changes in culture involve shifts in emphasis in processing from one hemisphere to another (in The Master and His Emissary).
Short answer: no and no.
Silly answer: if you *reaalllllyyyy* stretch out what “having a neuron that corresponds to a thought” could possibly to mean, all the way to the point of it not meaning much at all, then yes, you have specific neurons that recognize your [grandmother and Jennifer Aniston](https://www.nature.com/articles/news050620-7) and everyone else you’ve ever met.
Real answer: your question is sort of like asking if there’s a single transistor in your playstation that corresponds to donkey kong’s face. No, that’s not how computers work: transistors are just little logic gates that turn on and off. You get donkey kongs face because hundreds of thousands of transistors are all in a particular on/off position at a given time. Neural processing is similar – it’s a matter of systems, not specific neurons. But that being said, it appears to be pretty sure at this point that there are systems that handle specific kinds of thinking. They may not always be in the same part brain, so it’s better to think of them as networks. But, there’s evidence of a [“face recognizing” network](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07668-4) (we can even completely reconstruct the face you’re looking at from just neural firings), a [“reasoning about other people’s beliefs, intentions, and desires” network](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03399-2), [a language network](https://twitter.com/ev_fedorenko/status/1420650532998369282?lang=en), and others. I don’t know a ton about things that happen at the level of neurons – [orientation in space](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGxVfKJqX5E) is one (click the link for a video from the 50s of some people listening to neurons fire for the first time) – but most higher order thinking happens at the network level.
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