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Brain Specialisation
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About the lecture
In this lecture, we think about brain specialisation, focusing in particular on: (i) the early work of Paul Broca in isolating a language production area of the brain in the left frontal lobe; (ii) the role that patient Tan’s lesion and resultant expression of language played in enabling Paul Broca to make the assessments that led to these findings; (iii) Wernicke’s area and its somewhat opposing role to Broca’s area; (iv) the importance of sampling from a large number of individuals in order to conclude on the role of a particular brain region.
About the lecturer
Dr Ashok Jansari is a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Dr Jansari’s research interests include memory disorders, prosopagnosia, executive functions, and synaesthesia. Dr Jansari is most famous for his research into prosopagnosia, having made numerous TV appearances, including on BBC1’s The One Show, as well as hosting his own ‘Neuro Talk’ YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/DrAshokJansariNeuroTalk/featured
Some of Dr Jansari's recent publications include 'Acquired synaesthesia following 2C-B use' (2019), 'Using virtual reality to investigate multitasking ability in individuals with frontal lobe lesions' (2019), and 'Identification from CCTV: Assessing police super-recogniser ability to spot faces in a crown and susceptibility to change blindness' (2018).
In the last lecture, we were introduced to the central nervous system
00:00:07and the fact that information is posted
00:00:11in the brain by electrical signals going around
00:00:14in this lecture. We're going to look at
00:00:18what are the different areas of the brain?
00:00:20How do we know that different areas do different things?
00:00:22The way we started understanding brain specialisation was because
00:00:27of a very important neurologist called Paul Broker,
00:00:32who was working in Paris in the 18 hundreds.
00:00:35Broker happened to have a patient who had some sort of brain dysfunction.
00:00:40I can't remember there is epilepsy or what.
00:00:45But the important thing is that Broken noticed
00:00:48something that his patient had brain damage,
00:00:51but it only affected his ability to speak.
00:00:54So this patient who became known as Tan because
00:00:58of Tony Sound he could make sounded like tan.
00:01:01He couldn't create language apart from the sound town.
00:01:06But everything else seems to be okay.
00:01:11So if you asked uh Tan to hold up five fingers, he's holed up five fingers.
00:01:13Now, what that shows is that he can understand what you've just said,
00:01:21and he can respond to that with the behaviour, which is holding up five fingers.
00:01:25If you ask him to point to the cup on the table, he could point to that cup,
00:01:31which shows that he can visually recognise objects
00:01:36and is fine visually.
00:01:39If you asked him, how many fingers did I ask you to hold up earlier, he'd hold up five,
00:01:42because that's how many fingers you'd asked him to hold up before.
00:01:49If you said what is two plus two, he'd held up four fingers.
00:01:51So what we see here is that tans ability to take it language in and understand it.
00:01:56It's OK. His memories okay. His vision is okay. His counting ability is fine.
00:02:02The only thing that was problematic for Etan was creating language.
00:02:09So Paul broker made what was at the time, a monumental suggestion.
00:02:14He said,
00:02:20I think that our brains are organised with specialisations,
00:02:21different areas of the brain do different things
00:02:27and that what's happened in my patient tan is that
00:02:30the area that's responsible for creating language has been damaged.
00:02:33So this was a theory, of course. Uh, they didn't know for certain.
00:02:38But then eventually, when Tan passed away,
00:02:43they did a post mortem and they looked at his brain.
00:02:46What they found is that almost all of trans brain was completely fine,
00:02:49so it looks like any other person's brain.
00:02:54But there's just one area that was damaged.
00:02:57And that area,
00:03:01um, was where the patient had the epilepsy or whatever seizures he'd had.
00:03:04And what had happened is that that area died away and this area filled up with fluid.
00:03:10So one of brokers,
00:03:16hypotheses or predictions came out to be true that
00:03:18only one area of the brain was damaged.
00:03:22Now what happened is that brokers started talking about this finding and
00:03:25his theory that different parts of the brain do different things.
00:03:30Only one party is damaged, the part that I think is for language.
00:03:34When he started talking about this, other neurologists started saying,
00:03:38I've got a patient that's just like that.
00:03:41Can't speak, can do everything else.
00:03:43And what happened is that whenever they
00:03:46autopsy these patients when they passed away,
00:03:49they found out was always the same area
00:03:52as in tan that was damaged.
00:03:55Now remember,
00:03:57one of the important things in science and in psychology is replication.
00:03:58You can't make a whole theory just from one finding.
00:04:03So what happened is that the study on Tan gave us the first clues.
00:04:07And then although the neurologist started
00:04:13replicating that with similar patients,
00:04:16and all of those patients always had damage in
00:04:18the same areas time if they couldn't speak.
00:04:21And that area is an area over here, above your temples
00:04:24and in tribute to broker.
00:04:29That area is now known as Broca's area,
00:04:31and it's the area that we now know is important for helping us create language.
00:04:34So brokers area is the area in our brain that is involved in creating language,
00:04:40and we can also see this in healthy people.
00:04:45If you put them into a brain scanner when we're speaking,
00:04:48that is the area of the brain that is involved.
00:04:52Soon after, Broker had this finding
00:04:56another
00:04:59neurologist called Carl Veronica.
00:05:00He started documenting a different type of problem.
00:05:03He had patients who could create language, but they couldn't understand language.
00:05:06So their ability to understand what was said was problematic,
00:05:11although they could create language.
00:05:15So Veronica said,
00:05:18I wonder whether there's a part of the brain that's damaged in my patients.
00:05:19That is different to brokers area,
00:05:23and what they found is that there's an area that's a
00:05:26bit further back from brokers area both in the Left Hemisphere.
00:05:28There's an area that's a bit further back that was damaged in these patients who
00:05:33could create language or who couldn't understand
00:05:37the language that was said to them.
00:05:40And so, in memory of Veronica, that area is now known as Veronica's area.
00:05:42So what we see here is that because of the study of patients,
00:05:47a very specific selective damage which only affected
00:05:52one ability and left everything else intact,
00:05:56were able to start understanding that different
00:06:00areas of the brain do different things.
00:06:03And that's where we end up with our models of brain specialisation.
00:06:06Different areas of the brain are involved in different functions, so
00:06:11the back areas of the visual areas,
00:06:15these areas of the language,
00:06:18this area is for motor control. This area is for
00:06:20managing behaviour, making decisions, et cetera.
00:06:25So what we have here is that the work of the early
00:06:29neurologists or the neurologist from the 18 hundreds has helped us understand
00:06:32a brain specialisation.
00:06:38And in the next lecture,
00:06:41we're going to look at how we can study some of
00:06:42this in healthy people using different types of brain imaging techniques
00:06:45
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Jansari, A. (2022, March 14). Localised and Distributed Brain Function - Brain Specialisation [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/options/localised-and-distributed-brain-function?auth=0&lesson=5340&option=16561&type=lesson
MLA style
Jansari, A. "Localised and Distributed Brain Function – Brain Specialisation." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 14 Mar 2022, https://massolit.io/options/localised-and-distributed-brain-function?auth=0&lesson=5340&option=16561&type=lesson