Humans have been called “the symbolic species” because they can grasp abstract symbolic patterns that generalize across a broad range of novel stimuli. This capacity is most evident in language learning, as well as in mathematics and music, where human cognition is vastly more developed than that of other primates. It is often proposed that the language faculty reflects a broader, human-specific ability to acquire and represent recursive structures or regular combinations of symbols. Our research team is committed to a transformative scientific program: to reveal the architecture of human symbolic thought, illuminate the brain mechanisms underlying conscious experience, and lay the groundwork to ultimately engineer conscious experience in ways that improve human life at the deepest level.