A new study shows that when you finish your spouse’s sentences or answer a fill-in-the-blank question, you’re engaging the brain’s relay station for memories, an area that until now was largely neglected by scientists studying language.
It seems obvious that speaking and understanding language draw upon our memories – of words, context, people, etc. – but psychologists have typically studied language and memory as separate functions of the brain, essentially ignoring any interconnection.
A new experiment conducted by University of California, Berkeley, psychologists shows that memory and language are in fact deeply linked, via the hippocampus, which plays a key role in memory associations.
Read more from Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/09/19/brains-hippocampus-helps-fill-in-the-blanks-of-language/