What Is Wernicke's Area?

In 1874, German doctor Wernick discovered that the left hemisphere had an important language area different from Broca's, which could control the skills of language understanding. Wernicke (also known as Wernicke and Wernicke) is the brain's auditory center and visual language center, and is an important academic term in neuropsychology. It is also mentioned in the field of psycholinguistics.

Wernicke

In 1874, a young German Carl Wernicke found another different area of the left hemisphere now known as Wernicke's area. The damage to Wernick's area will result in speech comprehension deficit. In 1874, a young German named Wernick discovered the left hemisphere also There is another important language area with skills to control language understanding. The area is now called Wernicke. Injuries in the Wernicke area of the brain can cause severe loss of understanding.

Wernicke District includes

On January 30, 2012, US researchers announced that the brain's language processing center is not located in the back of the cerebral cortex, and the scientific community's understanding of this problem has long been "wrong."

The author of the paper, Joseph Lauschke, a professor at the Georgetown University Medical Center in the United States, said in a press release that the more than 100-year-old theory was overturned and "textbooks will need to be rewritten."

At the end of the 19th century, German doctor Wernick, who studied brain injury and stroke, proposed that the brain's language processing center is behind the cerebral cortex, behind the auditory cortex that perceives sound. This view has been widely accepted by the scientific community, and the human brain language processing center is also known as the Wernick area.

However, after assessing 115 speech perception studies using multiple brain imaging techniques, Lauschke and his colleagues concluded that the real Wernicke zone was located in front of the auditory cortex and was only about 3 cm from the forebrain. Their paper was published online this week in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers said that since the rise of cognitive neuroscience in the 1990s, scientists have found many contradictions about Wernicke, but most people are still reluctant to deny the old theory that has been more than 100 years old, and this " The thesis is to make a consensus between data and theory. "

Determining the true center of human brain language processing will have important clinical value. "When a patient is speechless or has difficulty understanding the language, we will now have a good idea of where it was hurt," said Lauscheck.

In addition, this new finding also shows that the language relationship between humans and non-human primates is closer than previously thought, because the language processing centers of the two are actually located in the same region of the brain. ^[1]