"Just Predicting The Next Word": How Our Own Brains Resemble AI

Send us Fan Mail 📖 Read the companion article 📡 Now available for broadcast on PRX Are you building sentences like an architect—nested grammatical trees and clean constituents? Or are you laying down the next available brick, relying on linear probability-driven chunks that “shouldn’t” exist as units at all? In this Deep Dive, we unpack new evidence that the brain represents certain non-hierarchical language structures (like VERB + PREPOSITION + DETERMINER: “sat on the”) as real cognitive obj...