Studies of individuals with brain injury have led many researchers to believe that the brain contains distinct knowledge systems for different domains of experience. We provide evidence against this view by showing that concepts from different categories are jointly represented within the same brain regions, according to a shared representational code.

We asked which areas of the cerebral cortex represent information about the meanings of words. Previous studies had indicated that large portions of the temporal, parietal, and frontal lobes participate in processing language meaning, but it was unknown which regions actually encoded information about individual word meanings.

In this study, we addressed the question of how the contents of our thoughts – concepts, ideas, beliefs – are related to the physical world that we experience through our senses by evaluating six different models of concept representation.