Language and thought are not the same thing: evidence from neuroimaging and neurological patients.
Is thought possible without language? Individuals with global aphasia, who have almost no ability to understand or produce language, provide a powerful opportunity to find out. Surprisingly, despite their near-total loss of language, these individuals are nonetheless able to add and subtract, solve logic problems, think about another person's thoughts, appreciate music, and successfully navigate their environments. Further, neuroimaging studies show that healthy adults strongly engage the brain's language areas when they understand a sentence, but not when they perform other nonlinguistic tasks such as arithmetic, storing information in working memory, inhibiting prepotent responses, or listening to music. Together, these two complementary lines of evidence provide a clear answer: many aspects of thought engage distinct brain regions from, and do not depend on, language.
Psychiatry Department, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, Massachusetts.|Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.|Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA), University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California.
Evelina
E
Fedorenko
University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Rosemary
R
Varley
D001037:Aphasia / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology; D001921:Brain / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000503:physiopathology; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D059907:Functional Neuroimaging; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D013850:Thinking / Q000502:physiology*
aphasia; cognitive control; executive functions; fMRI; functional specificity; language; music; navigation; neuropsychology; numerical cognition; semantics; syntax; theory of mind