Plenary IV: How does the brain create language?

There is little doubt that cognitive phenomena are the result of neural activity. However, there has been slow progress towards articulating an overarching computational theory of how exactly this happens. I will discuss a simplified mathematical model of the brain, involving brain areas, spiking neurons, random synapses, local inhibition, hebbian plasticity, and long-range interneurons. Emergent behaviors of the resulting dynamical system — established both analytically and through simulations — include assemblies of neurons and universal computation. By simulating neural systems in this model, at a scale of tens of millions of neurons, we can emulate certain high-level cognitive phenomena such as sequence memorization, few-shot learning of classification tasks, planning in the blocks world, and parsing of natural language. I will describe current work aiming at creating in this framework a neuromorphic language organ: a neural tabula rasa which, on input consisting of a modest amount of grounded language, is capable of language acquisition: lexicon, syntax, semantics, comprehension, and generation.