There was a fun article in early March showing that the same is true for image recognition deep neural networks. They were able to identify nodes that corresponded with "Spider-Man", whether shown as a sketch, a cosplayer, or text involving the word "spider".
deep neural nets are an extension of sparse autoencoders which perform nonlinear principal component analysis [0,1]
There is evidence for sparse coding and PCA-like mechanisms in the brain, e.g. in visual and olfactory cortex [2,3,4,5]
There is no evidence though for backprop or similar global error-correction as in DNN, instead biologically plausible mechanisms might operate via local updates as in [6,7] or similar to locality-sensitive hashing [8]
https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/