This animation turns talk balloons (like in a comic book) into sketches of complex molecules, on the theory that language is a chemical transaction, mediated through neurons to and from the musculoskeletal systems in communication. Ants do something similar.
We ("we" -- not me necessarily) say the meanings trigger additional processing and that the chemical sensation of hearing or reading language is not akin to reading or hearing music, in that “music is a dead end” in terms of making all those wheels turn, the ones that language turns. We call this “mental imagery” and music often has that too.
Certainly after listening intently to a human language, something flips to where it’s no longer necessary to do a simultaneous translation, to / from a native language. We could say this happens when another language is no longer “hosted” but is able to run on “bare metal” but we don’t. When we think about brains we’re not that focused on metals.
Where metal gets into our thinking sometimes is through “trains of thought” i.e. in comparing thoughts to a succession of train cars, we’re bringing not only the trains themselves, but rails into the picture. That’s a metallic vista for sure. We could take those comic thought balloons and go from words, to chemical diagrams, to chugging trains going by. All the associations of a train whistle… some are more mesmerized than others.
In telling the history of psychoanalysis, it’s important to not forget the buildup through public interest in both hypnosis and animal magnetism. Electromagnetism was being heralded by some (Thomas Edison included) as the outward manifestation of our thoughts, quite possibly persistent after the death of a body. Looking back though, we see language gearing up for the internet, whereby alchemical diffusion could be (a) more pinpoint switched and (b) global.
Broadcast TV does not lend itself to pinpoint switching such that targeted information needs to travel more by phone and mail. Once video content became super easy to source and share, the comic talk balloons started filling with video communications, a phenomenon remarked upon often by Marshall McLuhan, as he sensed the ripple effects would be enormous.
