The underlying neuronal principles of the cognitive processes such as memory, perception, or decision-making have in common that they are codified in a distributed and disperse manner in the brain, and present plasticity in associative synapsis and nets of neuronal attractors. All this make that the information storage capacity depends on the variable number of the associative and recurrent synapsis of each neuron.

On the basis of this and other principles of computation of the cerebral cortex, a study proposes that syntax or the rules and principles in which all these principles of the cortical areas of the human brain are combined to make the formation of the language possible.

This study has been published by Gustavo Deco, from the Department of Information and Communication Technologies and director of the Centre of Cognition and Brain of the Pompeu Fabra University, along with Edmund T. Rolls, neuroscientist of the Centre for Computational Neuroscience of Oxford and from the Department of Computational Sciences of the University of Warwick, in the United Kingdom, in the printed version of the magazine Brain Research.

The authors of the study suggest the existence of cortical modules formed by an attractive local neuronal net, of 2-3 millimetres of diameter, with capacity of 10,000 words, subjects, verbs, and predicates, depending on the module.

According to this system, “thought could be compared with a deep layer of the language, and for the information being transmitted to other people, the modules that contains the syntactic information should be in contact."  

Consequently, from the computer simulations, the authors suggest that the modules that contains the neurons whose synapsis codified for the subject, verb and predicate should be temporally in contact. And vice versa, "in the same way, a related system could decode a temporal pre-stablish sequence."