Date: Friday, April 24, 2026
Time: 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Location: Singleton Audiorium, Building 46

Talk Title: Searching for the language of thought

Abstract: In this talk, I will cover our work on how neural circuits construct more sophisticated concepts out of modular parts. The idea that composition allows infinite use of finite means to express thought dates back to von Humboldt’s classic study of human language, yet insight into its mechanistic underpinnings has been elusive. Resolving this required a confluence of three difficult milestones: (ii) a distinction between composition and less sophisticated forms of reuse; (ii) a compellingly compositional behavior in a model organism for which we have statistical power and large-scale circuit interrogation tools; and (iii) an appropriate theoretical framework for elucidating how neural activations may speak to a compositional mechanism. Our pivotal breakthrough was to demonstrate that in open-ended settings, rats innately and robustly utilize compositional solutions as von Humboldt intended it: iteratively composing more and more complex abstractions starting from an impoverished set of elemental parts. In addition to describing this behavioral experimental framework, I will cover how by exploiting large-scale cellular resolution recordings, we then found an astonishingly lego-like underlying mechanism in prefrontal cortex.