[WTI-trainee] [WTI-BrainWorks] Current Works in Human Neuroscience | Invited Speaker Evelina Fedorenko | Mon 12/15

[Lizzie Gao]

Dear Colleagues,

We are delighted to host Professor *Evelina Fedorenko* as the
invited speaker for the Neuroscience Current Works Seminar next *Monday,
December 15th, at 4 pm* in *Room 180A, 100 College St*.

[image: Screenshot 2025-12-08 at 4.13.43 PM.png]

*Talk Title: Language and thought in humans and machines.*
I seek to understand how humans understand and produce language, and how
language relates to—and works together with—the rest of human cognition. I
will discuss the ‘core’ language network, which includes left-hemisphere
frontal and temporal areas, and show that this network is ubiquitously
engaged during language processing across input and output modalities,
strongly interconnected, and causally important for language. This language
network plausibly stores language knowledge and supports linguistic
computations related to accessing words and constructions from memory and
combining them to interpret (decode) or generate (encode) linguistic
messages. Importantly, the language network is sharply distinct from
higher-level systems of knowledge and reasoning. First, the language areas
show little neural activity when individuals solve math problems, infer
patterns from data, or reason about others’ minds. And second, some
individuals with severe aphasia lose the ability to understand and produce
language but can still do math, play chess, and reason about the world.
Thus, language does not appear to be necessary for thinking and reasoning.
Human thinking instead relies on several brain systems, including the
network that supports social reasoning and the network that supports
abstract formal reasoning and fluid intelligence. These systems are
sometimes engaged when we use language in the real world—and thus have to
work with the language system—but are not language-selective. Many exciting
questions remain about the representations and computations in the systems
of thought and about how the language system interacts with these
higher-level systems. Furthermore, the sharp separation between language
and thought in the human brain may have implications for how we think about
this relationship in the context of AI models, and for what we can expect
from neural network models trained solely on linguistic input with the
next-word prediction objective.

Please join us!

If you are a postdoc or a graduate student and are interested in joining
Professor Fedorenko for lunch, please sign up here
<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SbfqGH-UgT57uinNAQ4c4nQvQcyTh83hDVYZvTD0jJw/edit?usp=sharing>
 *before 12 noon on Friday*. There are limited slots so this will be first
come first serve.


See you there,
Kia, Roeland, Lizzie, Shruti
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