Abstract

Abstract. The human brain has evolved the capacity for language not only through specific mechanisms of routinized articulation of speech patterns, but through general mechanisms of adaptive memory organization. As shown by amnesic syndromes in humans and animals, the consolidation of memory requires neural traffic between localized neocortical networks, specialized for sensory or motor articulation, and the more diffuse, densely-interconnected limbic networks at the core of the brain. The connectivity of limbic networks allows not only the integration of widespread cortical regions, but the recruitment of subcortical motivational systems. A cognitive representation, such as supports the understanding of a word, is thus multileveled, with four or five discrete network levels in the pathway linking limbic (visceral) with neocortical (sensorimotor articulation) representations. Through their influences on subcortical arousal systems, the limbic networks provide motivational control over the consolidation process. Through reentrant corticolimbic traffic, language appears to be articulated in neocortical networks through a microdevelopmental process that begins in the prelinguistic, syncretic, postural-affective matrix of felt emotional significance represented at the limbic core of the brain. In its fundamental architecture, meaning is thus embodied. On the other hand, conscious realization of meaning may require the differentiation of specific form out of the syncretic paralimbic matrix, and this realization

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