A controversy about whether we need language to think pits two MIT scholars against each other: Noam Chomsky (yes) vs. Evelina Fedorenko (no).

For a long time, it was only a philosophical issue: Plato saw thinking as a conversation with oneself. If you don’t form concepts into words are you really thinking? Chomsky agreed. But later, neuroscientists like Fedorenko got involved, offering some research findings.

Last summer at the New York Times, science writer Carl Zimmer reported,

When Dr. Fedorenko began this work in 2009, studies had found that the same brain regions required for language were also active when people reasoned or carried out arithmetic.

But Dr. Fedorenko and other researchers discovered that this overlap was a mirage. Part of the trouble with the early results was that the scanners were relatively crude. Scientists made the most of their fuzzy scans by combining the results from all their volunteers, creating an overall average of brain activity.

“Do We Need Language to Think?,” June 19, 2024

Mathematical thinking may not need language centers

Using more advanced scanners, Fedorenko was able to collect data on individual volunteers:

Each volunteer had a language network — a constellation of regions that become active during language tasks. “It’s very stable,” Dr. Fedorenko said. “If I scan you today, and 10 or 15 years later, it’s going to be in the same place.”

The researchers then scanned the same people as they performed different kinds of thinking, such as solving a puzzle. “Other regions in the brain are working really hard when you’re doing all these forms of thinking,” she said. But the language networks stayed quiet. “It became clear that none of those things seem to engage language circuits,” she said. “Need Language to Think?”

At least some people who lose their language ability due to a stroke or brain damage can, for example, do algebra.

Sweeping generalization?

That said, the researchers’ generalization in their abstract is fairly sweeping: “We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought.” Thus they disagree with Plato.

But there is an underlying problem here. They are assuming a history of the human mind and that history does not exist. For example, they continue, “Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.”

But there is no evidence that any of it “co-evolved” — or “evolved” at all. We see evidence of the human mind at work, whether in language or mathematics, where we see it. It pops up suddenly in prehistory. And it seems to have a rather loose relationship with the distressed human body afflicted by dementia or near death.

Language centers of the human brain enable speech. But “the signature sophistication of human cognition” to which the researchers refer is as immaterial as the discovery that pi (π) is an irrational number. And that discovery can only really be discussed and communicated meaningfully with others if we assume the existence of a capacity for language with which the ability to discover it co-exists. In other words, language may not be needed to discover a mathematical concept but the fact that it is certainly needed to share and extend it means that we can’t leave out the role of language in its development.

It’s a good question whether the concept of the “evolution” of the human mind gets in the way of understanding how it relates to the workings of the human brain.

Here’s the abstract from the paper by Fedorenko and colleagues:

Language is a defining characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions, that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking. We begin by introducing the brain network that supports linguistic ability in humans. We then review evidence for a double dissociation between language and thought, and discuss several properties of language that suggest that it is optimized for communication. We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.

– Fedorenko, E., Piantadosi, S.T. & Gibson, E.A.F. Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought. Nature 630, 575–586 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07522-w

Note: Some researchers think that the situation with respect to language and the brain is even more complex than Fedorenko and her colleagues are allowing for in their article.

You may also wish to read: The human mind has no history. There is no good reason to assume that human intelligence evolved from mud to mind via a long slow history. When we look at the human past, we see lights flashing on suddenly. Technology evolves but not the mind as such.