Wernicke's area, long considered the seat of language comprehension in the human brain, may not be.WIKIMEDIA, DATABASE CENTER FOR LIFE SCIENCEThe map of language centers in the human brain is being redrawn. Researchers at Northwestern University have determined that Wernicke’s area, a hotdog-shape region in the temporal lobe of the left hemisphere, may not be the seat of language comprehension, as has been scientific dogma for the past 140 years. Instead, the team suggests in a study published today (June 25) in the neurology journal Brain, understanding the meaning of words happens in the left anterior temporal lobe, while sentence comprehension is handled by a complex network of brain areas.
“This provides an important change in our understanding of language comprehension in the brain,” Marek-Marsel Mesulam, lead study author and director of Northwestern’s Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center, said in a statement.
Neuroscientist Carl Wernicke discovered in 1874 that some stroke victims with damage to the left sides of their brains suffered language impairment, which came to be known as Wernicke aphasia. Because those patients could often speak clearly, though nonsensically, and had trouble understanding simple instructions, Wernicke and other researchers surmised that the patients’ strokes had damaged the language comprehension center of the brain.
Instead of working with stroke victims, Mesulam and his colleagues studied patients with a rare form of language-affecting dementia called primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Mesulam, who is a leading ...
