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.