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