"The discovery solves a long-standing problem in cognitive neuroscience: Where do symbols"the basic units of thought"come from?" says Winrich Freiwald, head of the lab. "It also points to a future"a near future"in which we can understand thinking mechanistically."

Compositional generalization is an influential hypothesis in neuroscience for explaining the wide variety of human abilities that use abstract thought to generate new ideas, including math, written and spoken language, drawing, dancing, handwriting, and musicianship. It may also characterize cognitive abilities we share with other animals, such as reasoning, object manipulation, and tool use.