A neural framework for the origin of meaning: network dynamics, context and the hippocampus
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences July 9, 2026 Andrew P. Maurer, Sara Burke, Mary A. Peterson et al.
The brain generates meaning not from isolated regions but as an emergent property of large-scale recurrently connected networks, with the hippocampus playing a central role. The authors propose five principles: network-level emergence, reentrant processing, dynamic stability, grounding and multi-level integration, and context-dependency. They argue that meaning arises from coordinated activity across distributed hubs, bidirectional hippocampal-cortical loops that inform perception with prior experience, attractor-like states that balance stability and flexibility, and the linking of embodied sensorimotor experiences with abstract concepts. The hippocampus dynamically modulates meaning based on task demands, prior knowledge, and emotional states, transforming sensory input into coherent, context-rich meaning across the lifespan.