Wired for Words

A critical synthesis of over 150 years of research on the brain’s networks that enable us to communicate through language.

The neural architecture of language has been a hotly debated topic in neurology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, and philosophy since the early 1800s. Is language separable from intelligence? Is it enabled by dedicated and localizable neural networks? Do we speak and understand with our left hemisphere? How did language emerge? Is language grounded in sensorimotor systems, or is it abstract and amodal? Will we ever have a clear picture of how syntax, the pinnacle of human linguistic prowess, is organized neurologically?

Wired for Words answers these questions and more. Gregory Hickok tells the stories behind the big ideas, revealing the source of both modern progress and persistent myths. Drawing on decades of research using tools and insights from neurology, functional imaging, neurosurgery, linguistics, psychology, and engineering, Hickok builds a new understanding of the neural architecture—the components and connection patterns—of the brain’s language system from sound to meaning to speech.