Chapter 1. Language and Brain Plasticity

Short Description

One hundred years ago, scientists believed that language depended on two key areas in the left hemisphere.

Long Description

Wernicke's area was thought to handle word selection and sentence construction, while Broca's area was thought to control the last stage of generating speech sounds. Today, we understand that language is far more complex.

The program explores an award-winning nuclear physicist's significant loss in the ability to use language. He has great difficulty understanding anything that is said to him, or what he reads, as well as great difficulty producing language. He can speak, but what he says lacks coherence. A brain scan reveals that the physicist has suffered severe damage to his brain, including total destruction of Wernicke's area.

Brain scans of patients experiencing various language disorders reveal that they have often experienced damage to the two classic language areas. However, research also reveals a network of many different brain areas that handle specific aspects of language. The researcher reports that some patients have difficulty naming objects, while others have difficulty understanding grammatical rules. Clearly, language is a complex process involving many different brain regions that serve specific functions.

Patients often recover some basic aspects of language, such as their capacity to recognize word sounds. This finding suggests that some aspects of language do not require their own specialized brain structure. However, aphasic patients rarely show full recovery. Clearly, it is difficult for brain areas that have long performed one function to assume a new one.

Questions