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

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

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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