Do different languages light up different neurons for the same concept ? Do clusters of neurons correspond to a certain thought?
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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).
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