Abstract Thinking: The Secret Area Of ​​The Brain That Allows You To Imagine The Impossible

Your brain may be doing something that science is only now beginning to understand. Researchers have discovered a brain region capable of combining ideas and creating entirely new thoughts. The discovery could revolutionize our understanding of intelligence, creativity, and even imagination.

Imagine asking someone to draw an animal that doesn't exist. Even without ever having seen that creature before, the brain manages to mix familiar parts, dog legs, pig tail, camel humps, and create something completely new. This ability to combine ideas, imagine unprecedented possibilities, and solve never-before-seen problems is one of the most impressive characteristics of human intelligence.

For decades, scientists have tried to understand how the brain does this. Now, a new study has brought an important discovery: researchers have identified a brain region that seems to function as a kind of "assembly center" for abstract thought.

The big question behind this research was to understand how the brain manages to generalize knowledge. That is, how we use past experiences to deal with completely new situations. This ability is present in almost everything we do: language, mathematics, music, dance, drawing, writing, tool use, and even social relationships.

Many scientists believe this is only possible because the brain works with small, symbol-like “mental units” that can be rearranged and recombined in countless ways. The problem is that, until now, no one had been able to clearly demonstrate where and how these “symbols” existed in the brain.

To investigate this, researchers created an extremely sophisticated experiment using rhesus monkeys. The animals were given a task similar to drawing shapes on a screen. They needed to execute sequences of movements to achieve certain objectives.

The important detail is that these sequences constantly changed. This forced the animals to combine known movements in new ways, instead of just repeating something memorized. The scientists wanted to find out if the brain treated certain movements as “reusable pieces,” capable of being combined in countless different sequences.

While the monkeys performed the tasks, the researchers recorded the electrical activity of hundreds of neurons simultaneously in eight different brain regions linked to motor planning, decision-making, and cognition. For this purpose, extremely precise neural sensors were used, capable of capturing patterns of brain activity in real time.

Then, the scientists used advanced computational analyses to compare how neurons responded in different situations. They looked for three main characteristics that would indicate the existence of “neural symbols”: stability of the representation even when the movement changed slightly, brain patterns organized into distinct categories, and reuse of these representations in new combinations.

It was then that the most important discovery of the study emerged. A specific area of ​​the brain called the ventral premotor cortex presented exactly these characteristics. This region seemed to store “abstract units of action,” as if the brain created small, reusable mental blocks to build complex behaviors.

Instead of controlling only simple movements, this area seemed to represent more abstract motor concepts, which could be reorganized into new sequences as needed. In other words, the brain not only reacts to the world: it creates flexible mental structures capable of generating unprecedented behaviors.

This discovery could profoundly change our understanding of intelligence, creativity, and even language. Many scientists believe that similar mechanisms may be involved in extremely sophisticated human functions, such as solving mathematical problems, creating art, learning languages, or planning complex strategies.

The study may also help in the development of artificial intelligence more similar to the human brain, as well as opening avenues for understanding neurological and psychiatric diseases that affect abstract thinking and planning, such as schizophrenia, autism, and some types of dementia.

Ultimately, the research shows something fascinating: perhaps human creativity doesn't arise from nothing. It may stem from the brain's incredible ability to break down old experiences into small mental pieces and reorganize them to create something completely new.

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Neural representation of action symbols in primate frontal cortex

Lucas Y. Tian, Kedar Garzón Gupta, Daniel J. Hanuska, Adam G. Rouse, Mark A. G. Eldridge, Marc H. Schieber, Xiao-Jing Wang, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Winrich A. Freiwald

Nature. 20 May 2026DOI:10.1038/s41586-026-10297-x

Abstract: 

A hallmark of intelligence is proficiency in solving new problems, including those that substantially differ from previously seen problems. Problem solving in turn depends on the goal-directed generation of novel ideas and behaviours1, which has been proposed to involve internal representations of discrete units (or symbols) that can be recombined into numerous possible composite representations1,2,3,4,5,6,7. Although this view has been influential in cognitive-level explanations of behaviour, definitive evidence for a neuronal substrate of symbols has remained elusive. Here we identify a neural population that encodes action symbols, recombinable representations of discrete units of motor behaviour, in a specific area of the frontal cortex. In macaque monkeys performing a drawing-like task, we found behavioural evidence that action elements (strokes) exhibit three crucial features that indicate an underlying symbolic representation: (1) invariance over low-level motor parameters; (2) categorical structure, which reflects discrete action types; and (3) recombination into novel sequences. Based on simultaneous neural recordings across eight regions of the motor, premotor and prefrontal cortex, we identified population activity specifically in the ventral premotor cortex that encodes planned actions in a manner that also reflects invariance, categorical structure and recombination. These findings reveal a neural representation of action symbols localized to the ventral premotor cortex and a putative neural substrate for symbolic operations.