Each of us perceives the world through the unique vantage point of our own mind, but we all experience the world through a human body. According to a scientific theory with ICSI roots, this shared experience of physically sensing and interacting with our surroundings is a key building block in the acquisition of language. 

For nearly two decades from the late 1990s through the mid-2010s, ICSI researchers Srini Narayanan, Jerome Feldman, George Lakoff, and other collaborators advanced a neural theory of language—explaining how multiple brain functions work together to understand and learn language—and explored implications and potential applications of this theory across a range of fields from human cognition to computer science. With funding from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), Office of Naval Research, National Science Foundation, and other agencies, the interdisciplinary team examined how we understand concepts, metaphors, and narratives not only through our cognitive capacity but through our interactions with the physical world. This work helped spark new ways of thinking about language, new computational models, and innovative tools for advancing linguistics and cognitive science research.   

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What made ICSI a good place to pursue these projects?

“It couldn’t have happened anywhere else, really. It relied on different sources of funding, different faculty groups, different research groups and students. ICSI made interdisciplinary work extremely easy. No one cared if you were a computer science person or a psychology person or a language person. It was just about working together on this project, and that’s really hard to pull off on a university campus. 

There was also collegiality to the interaction at ICSI that was extremely nourishing. We had these teas, which were a great place for students and faculty and researchers to be on an equal footing—to interact as ICSI researchers and not as faculty and student. That process was very important.”

Srini Narayanan

Former AI Group Leader; now Principal Scientist at Google

This story was published in January 2026 as part of a retrospective series highlighting ICSI’s accomplishments and impacts over the years. To learn about our ongoing work, explore our Core Research Themes.