Imagine Genghis Khan, Aretha Franklin, and the Cleveland Cavaliers performing an opera on Maui. This silly sentence makes a serious point: As humans, we can flexibly generate and comprehend an unbounded number of complex ideas. Little is known, however, about how our brains accomplish this. Here we assemble clues from disparate areas of cognitive neuroscience, integrating recent research on language, memory, episodic simulation, and computational models of high-level cognition. Our review is framed by Fodor's classic language of thought hypothesis, according to which our minds employ an amodal, language-like system for combining and recombining simple concepts to form more complex thoughts. Here, we highlight emerging work on combinatorial processes in the brain and consider this work's relation to the language of thought. We review evidence for distinct, but complementary, contributions of map-like representations in subregions of the default mode network and sentence-like representations of conceptual relations in regions of the temporal and prefrontal cortex.

中文翻译：

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概念和组合性：寻找大脑的思维语言。

想象成吉思汗，阿瑞莎·富兰克林和克里夫兰骑士队在毛伊岛上表演歌剧。这个愚蠢的句子提出了一个严肃的观点：作为人类，我们可以灵活地产生和理解无数的复杂思想。然而，人们对我们的大脑如何做到这一点知之甚少。在这里，我们收集了来自认知神经科学各个领域的线索，并整合了有关语言，记忆，情节模拟和高级认知计算模型的最新研究。我们的评论以Fodor的经典思想语言假设为框架，根据该思想假设，我们的大脑采用无语态的，类似于语言的系统来组合和重新组合简单的概念，以形成更复杂的思想。在这里，我们重点介绍了大脑中组合过程的新兴工作，并考虑了这项工作与思维语言的关系。