Something fascinating is happening as you watch this video. You are effortlessly converting a series of sounds into meaningful thoughts. To do that, your brain has to take a sound wave–a collection of frequencies streaming into your ears–and somehow extract from it a specific message that I’m trying to convey to you right now. Just as mysteriously, you could mute this video and turn on subtitles and get the same message. As a literate person, you effortlessly take in strings of visual shapes and decode them into meaningful information. As humans, we take language for granted and it’s an indispensable part of our daily lives. We rarely stop to think about how weird it is that we spend a huge amount of our time listening to other people make sounds or staring at symbols on a page. It’s even rarer that we ask ourselves how we do any of that. In this episode, we’ll talk about all this while exploring some of the neuroscience of language.