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There isn't really, properly, a "language part" of your brain. There are certainly areas of the brain that are more active or participatory in language generati
by nathan_compton 3y ago
There isn't really, properly, a "language part" of your brain. There are certainly areas of the brain that are more active or participatory in language generation, but the division of the brain into functional areas is much more conventional than, for example, the division of a computer into a mother board, a processor, a GPU, etc. In a much more rigorous sense, these computer parts constitute discrete units. Your brain is a bag of cells for which functional divisions are, in a very real sense, incidental.
To give a very concrete example, the part of your brain called the visual cortex by neuroscientists nevertheless is activated by auditory and other sensory stimuli and assuredly participates in the processing of other sensory input in other ways. I am very suspicious of any attempt to talk about the brain which forgets that it is, in a very real sense, a gestalt.
To your specific point, and taking into account all I've written above, I've got little doubt that some part of your brain really is a probabilistic language generating machine. But the exact point here is that your cognitive abilities constitute much, much more than merely the ability to generate plausible language. Indeed, as I experience complex cognition, conversion into language is often the last and most trivial part of the exercise.