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We share our thoughts with other minds, but we do not understand how. Having a common language certainly helps, but infants' and tourists' communicative success clearly illustrates that sharing thoughts does not require signals with a pre-assigned meaning. In fact, human communicators jointly build a fleeting conceptual space in which signals are a means to seek and provide evidence for mutual understanding. Recent work has started to capture the neural mechanisms supporting those fleeting conceptual alignments. The evidence suggests that communicators and addressees achieve mutual understanding by using the same computational procedures, implemented in the same neuronal substrate, and operating over temporal scales independent from the signals' occurrences.

Original publication

DOI

10.1016/j.tics.2015.11.007

Type

Journal article

Journal

Trends Cogn Sci

Publication Date

03/2016

Volume

20

Pages

180 - 191

Keywords

Brain, Communication, Comprehension, Concept Formation, Humans, Language