Hickok, Gregory Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language The MIT Press, 424 pages, 6 x 9 inches, ISBN: 978-0262553414
Gregory Hickok
On Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language
Interview of
January 15, 2026
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In a nutshell
I teach a course on the neural architecture of language at the University of California, Irvine. The first assignment I give my students is to pick a day and see how long they can go without using language: insert some earplugs and carry on with no talking, no texting, no reading, no language-based media. Most give up before the day is half over, reporting frustration, boredom, and isolation.
Yet millions of people around the world find themselves permanently in such a situation, cut off to varying degrees from family, friends, and society—even their livelihood—as a result of aphasia. Aphasia is a language disability caused by brain damage such as stroke, head injury, or neurodegeneration. It is not a hearing problem or a paralysis of the tongue. Sufferers cannot simply turn to reading and writing or learn sign language. Nor is it a problem of intelligence. Aphasia is a language problem.
It’s not a simple problem. Language turns out to be highly complex, composed of multiple nested hierarchies of processing routines structured into multi-component computational architectures. Consider, for example, that humans have only recently developed machines, computational architectures, and energy sources powerful enough to simulate the linguistic prowess that children master before they can make change for a $10. We are indeed “wired for words.” Researchers have been working for centuries trying to figure out exactly how the system works, how it is organized in the brain, how disease can attack different subsystems to produce different types of impairment, and how it might be repaired. And spectacular progress has been made, particularly in the last 25 years, as remarkable new investigative tools and fresh approaches have been applied to the problem. Wired for Words not only surveys the history and progress of this untold story but synthesizes it into a new understanding of the neural network, one that challenges many traditional assumptions and reveals some surprising insights about the human mind.
The wide angle
In its broadest scope, the book addresses the age-old mind-body problem: how does the 3-pound hunk of meat in our heads give rise to our ability to perceive the world, understand it, and act within it successfully? Although this problem falls under the broad umbrella of cognitive neuroscience, language is a unique testbed in that it involves many aspects of cognition within the same system—perception, motor control, semantic knowledge, decision making, attention, memory, social cognition. In fact, historically, language has figured prominently in answering some of the biggest questions about the mind and brain, including early 19th century debates on the localization of function in the brain, the idea that the two hemispheres are not symmetric in function, the major shift from stimulus-response behaviorism to the cognitive information processing view of the mind, and the recent debate over the role of mirror neurons in human cognition. If we can understand the neural foundation of language, we just might have solved the bigger question of the relation between mind and brain.
More specifically, Wired for Words explains current models and ideas concerning how language is organized and processed in the brain. It does so using a multidisciplinary approach and by illustrating key concepts with case studies. And it shows where these ideas came from in their historical context, sometimes revealing wrong turns or missed clues that led to now entrenched but misleading dogma. More than just a survey, though, the book synthesizes a vast body of knowledge into an entirely new model of the neural architecture of language that not only frames the organization of our existing linguistic system but also how it might have evolved, its connection to other non-linguistic systems, intelligence, musical ability, even dance.
Wired for Words also charts my own journey through the field’s whirlwind of progress, providing a first-hand account of some of the discoveries, theoretical do-overs, and surprises. In this sense, the book is in part a memoir of the scientific process during a period of rapid change. This experience shaped my path to this book. It started 25 years ago when I got a contract with MIT Press to write the first textbook on the cognitive neuroscience of language. But almost coincident with the signing of that deal, my collaborator and I hit upon what retrospectively turned out to be the biggest idea the field had seen in decades, the dual stream model of speech processing. I had to put the textbook project on hold until I worked out the details. That took about 15 years, it turned out, and by then an excellent textbook by another author had appeared. I asked the ever-patient editor at MIT Press if I could write a monograph instead, my own synthesis of the state of the field. He agreed. I decided on a format that would be accessible to students in my course that I had been teaching and developing since the late 90s, but without dumbing down the science in any way. The result is a more conversational discussion. I also decided to follow and elaborate on the basic content of my course, which had been tuned over the years to communicate up-to-date science while holding the interest of about 200 undergraduates for several weeks. I finally delivered a complete draft in 2024.
A close-up
If browsing, I'd hope readers encounter some of the case studies I describe to illustrate key concepts. The famous neurologist and author, Oliver Sacks, was a master of using neurological case studies to pull back the curtain on the workings of the mind. This is how I first got interested in neuroscience. I read Sacks’ classic, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, as an undergraduate and knew I had to make my career in cognitive neuroscience. As a post-doc at the Salk Institute in San Diego, I got to meet Dr. Sacks when he came to the lab to learn about some of my research on Williams Syndrome. It was related to his own work and so we started corresponding. (You can see evidence of this exchange in this paper from 1995) He ended up writing a letter of recommendation for me when I applied, successfully, for my current job at UC Irvine. My use of case studies derives from Sacks’ lasting influence on me.
I also hope a browsing reader might come across a description or two of some of the interesting methods, both classic and new, used in cognitive neuroscience research. These range from the quite dramatic (split brain and WADA methods) to technically brilliant (nuclear physics-based fMRI) to the exotic (direct cortical recording from awake humans and brain computer interface).
Finally, the first chapter, What is Language?, starts with a modified quote from the classic movie, The Princess Bride:
Language! You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
This sums up the biggest problem language scientists, like me, face in communicating our field to the public. Language comes so naturally to us that it seems like a simple ability. I mean, even a toddler can learn to do it! How could the science of language, then, be very interesting? But it only seems easy because we are “wired for words,” which is to say wired for the capacity to learn and use language. Once you look under the hood, you realize there’s some real intrigue to discover.
Lastly
First and foremost, my hope is that the book reveals a new appreciation for our gift of gab, its complexity, its evolutionary origins, and its biology. I love the idea that some readers might truly enjoy learning something new about themselves, a part of their biology that they use indispensably every day yet never gave it a moment’s thought before coming across my book. More poignantly, many of us have or will experience, directly or indirectly, the tragedy of losing our linguistic gift through stroke or neurodegenerative disease. I hope the book provides at least the little bit of comfort that comes with understanding.
I’m also hopeful that the progress we’ve made in the field will inspire new therapies for language disorders. In a recent survey among sufferers of various diseases, aphasia was rated #1 in terms of being most disruptive to quality of life, above (worse than) cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Speech therapy works, but often incompletely. But hope is on the horizon. Already, neural prosthetics are helping locked-in patients, those with an intact brain but without motor control to speak and write. Precisely placed implants in the brain can allow patients to communicate through a computer just by thinking about the words they want to speak. And neural prosthetics for aphasia treatment are also currently being developed and tested. Just today I was invited to join a multidisciplinary team of University of California researchers on such a project. I never thought in my lifetime that I’d see basic science research on the neural architecture of language contributing to these kinds of real-world clinical applications. Yet here we are!
