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Surprising Science

Language in the Brain

There is no single part of the human brain that gives it advanced language capabilities. Rather, humans rely on multiple parts of the brain to extract meaning from sentences.
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Researchers have determined that there is no single part of the human brain that gives it advanced language capabilities. Rather, humans rely on multiple parts of the brain—all of which are related evolutionary to different primitive functions—to extract meaning from sentences. “Depending on the type of grammar used in forming a given sentence, the brain will activate a certain set of regions to process it, like a carpenter digging through a toolbox to pick a group of tools to accomplish the various basic components that comprise a complex task.”

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