
An architecture for encoding sentence meaning in left temporal cortex - benbreen
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/37/11732.long#aff-1
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benbreen
I should add that I'm looking forward to someone with more understanding of
this field than I to share their thoughts on the paper - it caught my
attention because Steven Pinker just called it "the most important paper in
cognitive neuroscience in many years."

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oxtopus
Implications are that left mid-superior temporal cortex (LmSTC) carries
information about sentence-level meaning, which had kind of already been
implied in prior experimentation.

The discussion states that they "Provide preliminary evidence for a long-
standing theoretical conjecture of cognitive science: that the brain, on some
level, functions like a classical computer, representing structured semantic
combinations by explicitly encoding the values of abstract variables", which
is little more than hyperbole.

It's interesting, insofar as they identify a very specific region of the brain
dedicated to a specific aspect of understanding language, and which plays a
small role in a larger network of regions, but it's a bit of a stretch to
imply that it's the "most important paper in cognitive neuroscience in many
years". Pinker is quoted because this provides some empirical evidence for
some of his theories.

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oxtopus
I should also add when they mean "architecture" they mean it in the literal
sense -- the physical structure in the brain in which encoding sentence
meaning takes place.

