A person may be unable to form a sentence after a stroke yet still solve a difficult puzzle, recognize a hidden pattern, or make a sound logical judgment. That contrast points to a basic question about the mind: does reasoning depend on language, or can the brain think logically without words?
Cognitive neuroscientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research found that severe language impairment does not prevent people from performing well on logical reasoning tasks. Brain scans also showed that the regions responsible for processing language were not recruited when healthy participants reasoned through logical problems. The research was published in PNAS and led by Evelina Fedorenko, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences.
Logic may not depend on language
For thousands of years, philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists have argued over whether language is the machinery of thought or simply one of the tools used to express it. Logic and language appear closely connected because both can be broken into smaller parts and assembled into more complicated structures.
Hope Kean, a postdoc and former K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center graduate fellow in Fedorenko’s lab, notes that this resemblance has made language seem like a plausible foundation for abstract reasoning. “Abstract thinking has properties that look a lot like language,” Kean says, pointing to structural similarities. “You can decompose a thought into subcomponents, like little atoms of logical propositions, and you can combine them in a hierarchical manner to make more complex structured rules, very akin to language.”
Kean and Fedorenko, who is also a McGovern Institute investigator, questioned whether that similarity meant the same brain system must support both abilities. People usually need language to receive a logic problem, describe their reasoning, or explain an answer, but the mental work between those steps might occur elsewhere.
“There are aspects of thinking that seem to go beyond some of the limitations of language,” Kean explains. Logical reasoning demands precision that language often lacks. And language is linear, progressing one word at a time, whereas evaluating available information to reach logical conclusions can require thinking in less linear ways.
Source: SciTechDaily
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