Many philosophical theories of mind assume that human reason and language can be fully described and explained at a functional level, with no reference to neural mechanisms. That is, the mind can be characterized as the computational software that happens to run on the brain's hardware.

NTL research takes the opposite, embodied stance -- namely, that the human body and brain play a central role in characterizing human reason, and that the peculiarities of brain structure and neural computation shape crucial details of our capacity for thought and language.

Many applications also require deeper computational understanding of meaning; these include human-computer interaction, information retrieval, search engines and intelligent agents.