{"id":240594,"date":"2026-07-10T07:22:30","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T12:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/evidence-reveals-that-the-language-of-thought-is-not-natural-language"},"modified":"2026-07-10T07:22:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T12:22:30","slug":"evidence-reveals-that-the-language-of-thought-is-not-natural-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/evidence-reveals-that-the-language-of-thought-is-not-natural-language","title":{"rendered":"Evidence reveals that the language of thought is not natural language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/evidence-reveals-that-the-language-of-thought-is-not-natural-language2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Some people find it useful to talk through their problems\u2014but language isn\u2019t necessary for logical reasoning, cognitive neuroscientists at MIT\u2019s McGovern Institute for Brain Research say.<\/p>\n<p>In research <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2520095123\" target=\"_blank\">published in the journal <i>PNAS<\/i><\/a>, researchers led by MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Evelina Fedorenko have shown that people can perform well on tasks that require logical reasoning even if their language abilities are severely impaired. What\u2019s more, brain imaging shows that language-processing parts of the brain are not called on for logical reasoning.<\/p>\n<p>Philosophers, linguists and cognitive scientists have debated the relationship between language and thought for thousands of years, with many arguing that we use language to think. There are good reasons to suspect a close relationship between logic and language, acknowledges Hope Kean, a postdoctoral researcher and former K. Lisa Yang, Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center graduate fellow in Fedorenko\u2019s lab.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some people find it useful to talk through their problems\u2014but language isn\u2019t necessary for logical reasoning, cognitive neuroscientists at MIT\u2019s McGovern Institute for Brain Research say. In research published in the journal PNAS, researchers led by MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Evelina Fedorenko have shown that people can perform well on tasks [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}