our words contain and momentarily activate whole repositories of associated meanings, memories, and feelings, even when the exact meaning in a given context is specified. Within this millisecond of recollection, we begin to appreciate the multilayered beauty in the brain’s design for storing and retrieving words: each word can elicit an entire history of myriad connections, associations, and long-stored emotions. Indeed, you have just witnessed how the reading brain activates in half a second something akin to the daily efforts of poets and writers to find the perfect word, the mot juste,26
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