Science News: This Week (2009/3/29) corroborates my claim that the brain uses nigh all its inputs, including memory, to understand its current situation - including what words it hears.
In the brain, the gift of gab — or at least the gift of knowing what someone’s gabbing about — depends on sight, not just sound. If a listener sees a talker’s lips moving or hands gesturing, certain brain networks pitch in to decode the meaning of what’s being said, a new study suggests.
Based on some of my other reading about brain circuitry, it appears that any circuits in the brain stimulated by the totality of incoming stimulation contribute to invoking related past experience. This, it would seem, would include proprioceptive, interoceptive, hormone flux state, etc., information. Other sources I read some time ago reported that motor neuron areas have been observed to be active when the subject was directed to think about words meaning some activity. For example, 'run' activated motor areas for the legs. Brain involvement in understanding language, it seems to me, would be but a small portion of brain involvement in the business of living, and since understanding and acting on language is continually used in daily activities, more brain function may be involved in language use than the limited areas evaluated by past medical and other research as critical.
Just one more bit of information to help us remember that even our direct object level experience involves interpretation, illustrating another incidence of "the map is not the territory", and we evaluate our conscious experience as a dynamic map.
