As an alternative to the empiricist outside-in tabula rasa view, I raise the possibility that the brain already starts out as a nonsensical dictionary. It comes with evolutionarily preserved, preconfigured internal syntactical rules that can generate a huge repertoire of neuronal patterns. These patterns are regarded as initially nonsense neuronal words which can acquire meaning through experience. Under this hypothesis, learning does not create brand new brain activity patterns from scratch but is instead a “fitting process” of the experience onto a preexisting neuronal pattern.
