Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans also arguably have the most sophisticated communication system in the animal kingdom: natural language allows us to express complex and structured meanings. Some have therefore argued for a tight relationship between complex thought and language, postulating that reasoning, including logical reasoning, relies on linguistic representations. We systematically investigated the relationship between logical reasoning and language using two complementary approaches. First, we used noninvasive brain imaging (fMRI) to examine neural activity as healthy adults engaged in logical reasoning tasks.
