[8] Between the 1960s and 1990s, he further developed RNT by exploring its possible relationships to neurological structures and to thinking processes, especially the hypothesis that the nodes in his relational networks might correspond to cortical columns or minicolumns in the human neocortex.
His early work also developed the notion of "sememe" as a semantic object, analogous to the morpheme or phoneme in linguistics, and it was one of the inspirations for Roger Schank's Conceptual dependency theory, a methodology for representing language meaning directly within the Artificial Intelligence movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Lamb did research in North American Indian languages, specifically those geographically centered in California.
[11] His work at Semionics Associates led to patented designs of content-addressable memory (CAM) hardware for microcomputers based on his Relational Network Theory.
[12] By 1980, Lamb was in negotiations to sell his CAM design to another company, and he was invited to join the Department of Linguistics at Rice University by James E.