Stanislas Dehaene, Head of NeuroSpin, has given a talk on Zoom on January 17th.
Short abstract:
Summary of five years of collaborative research sponsored by ERC and by the Bettencourt-Schueller foundation. Communicative language is often seen as the key factor that explains the cognitive singularity of the human species. Instead, I propose that humans are characterized by multiple internal “languages of thought”, distributed in various cortical areas, which allow them to understand and compress any concept, whether linguistic, mathematical, musical... Each language is characterized by (1) the discretization of a domain using a small set of symbolic primitives, and (2) their recursive combination into nested structures of unbounded complexity. I will present experiments in three different domains: spatial sequences, binary sound sequences, and geometric shapes. In each case, human perception, memory, and brain activity are determined by minimal description length in the proposed language, where as non-human primate performance is captured by simpler non-symbolic models.