Beyond this, it&#x27;s doubly unsurprising when you remember that the brain isn&#x27;t anything like a context-switching CPU, but much more like a bunch of discrete DSP circuits. Much like computers can offload video decoding to a dedicated DSP &quot;pipeline&quot; that will continue performing each step without being coordinated by the CPU, language processing and construction—word-lookup, grammar, etc.—are steps in an offloaded &quot;pipeline&quot; of brain areas.<p>Though, highlighting a specific sentence of your quote, the analogous operation becomes quite clear:<p>&gt; We continuously predict what the rest of a sentence will contain[...]<p>Speculative execution via branch prediction!<p>(The important thing to highlight with that analogy, though, is that the brain has <i>multiple</i> &quot;branch predictors.&quot; In fact, one could think of speculative execution as an inherent low-level feature of each node in a recurrent neural network. This isn&#x27;t our executive function &quot;predicting the future&quot; generally; this is each part of the brain going on with its work independently by making assumptions that its speculative work isn&#x27;t going to go to waste.)