For thousands of years, philosophers have argued about the purpose of language. Starting in the 1960s, Noam Chomsky, a linguist at M.I.T., argued that we use language for reasoning and other forms of thought. “If there is a severe deficit of language, there will be severe deficit of thought,” he wrote. Dr. Fedorenko went on to become a cognitive neuroscientist at M.I.T., using brain scanning to investigate how the brain produces language. And after 15 years, her research has led her to a startling conclusion: We don’t need language to think.

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Persons: Plato, ”, Noam Chomsky, Evelina Fedorenko, Chomsky’s, Fedorenko