Nodes critical for the transfer of declarative information exist throughout the brain, particularly in the neocortex for sharing faces (for identifying friends), sound bites (for music appreciation), taste and olfactory experiences (for wine tasting), vestibular/proprioceptive impressions (for dancing), and so on. The nodes remain invariant to learning once development is complete (e.g., figure 6 of Tehovnik and Chen 2015), which creates a neural connectivity skeleton that is unique per individual at the micro-level, even though at the macro-level there are consistencies across individuals, e.g., the visual cortex is in the occipital area, the auditory cortex is in the temporal lobes, the somatosensory cortex is in the parietal lobes, etc. Focal electrical stimulation of sites within Broca’s area has been found to interrupt speech by preventing subjects from finding the correct words to finish a sentence (Penfield 1958), which defines the location of information nodes for sentence utterances. Information nodes have also been identified in the occipito-temporal cortex for naming objects including faces (Puce et al. 1999). Not surprisingly, the visual cortex of primates is a central node for the transfer of conscious visual information, as are all the other primary sensory areas of the neocortex for the transfer of conscious perception (Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2024; Tehovnik, Patel, Tolias et al. 2021; note that there is a difference between the transfer and the storage of information, Huang 2008). The information transfer rate by several dozens of cells in the lateral intraparietal area of monkeys transfers some 6% of the needed signal to perform a two-choice discrimination task (Tehovnik and Chen 2015). This concurs with the observation that disruption of the intraparietal area fails to abolish choice behavior in monkeys (Schiller and Tehovnik 2015). Thus, performing such a task is mediated by a distributed network of neurons operating in parallel.

The complete categorization of the nodes in the brain for the transfer of information has yet to be done, an effort not unlike categorizing the genome of organisms. Once categorized, measurements can proceed to deduce the information transfer rate (in bits per second) of a given node. The sum of the information passing across all the nodes (in one second) is expected to equal the total information transmitted for the execution of a behavior (Tehovnik and Chen 2015). A speech (once automated) can be delivered at 40 bits per second (Reed and Durlach 1998), and the neural tissue delivering the speech should account for all 40 bits per second, such that all the parallel channels transmitting the contents of the speech (Ojemann 1991) via neocortical-cerebellar loops (Hasanbegović 2024; Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2024) are made to funnel their information through the vocal apparatus to produce a string of utterances. Unlike the views of Chomsky that language is synonymous with thinking (Chomsky 1965, 2023), we suspect that language (like all other behaviors) is a byproduct of thinking whereby it was the thinking (during learning, Hebb 1949, 1968) that is responsible for automating one’s linguistic abilities.