How the brain builds sentences, neuron by neuron

A June 17, 2026 Nature news story by Max Kozlov on a wave of high-resolution recordings of single neurons during speech, which reveal the specialised cells that produce sentences word by word. The findings describe neural maps of the language-production cortex — distinguishing cells that encode phonemes from those that encode syllables, words, and grammatical structure — and bring brain–machine interfaces for restoring fluent speech in paralysed patients meaningfully closer to clinical reality.