Language understanding works like a protein-folding or Lego-assembly problem: words are flexible high-dimensional shapes (about 100,000 of them) whose approximate form is set by the word's name but adapts to context, and they have 'hands' that change shape as the word adapts, so that as data passes up through network layers the shapes and hands are adjusted until all the words can 'hold hands' and fit together into a coherent structure—and that mutual fitting is precisely what understanding is, for both humans and machines.