That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites-Broca's Area

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Next in our series of Neuroscience Bites, we discuss Broca's Area: a brain area important for controlling the muscles that produce speech. 

Hi, my name is Olive Kregolson, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another Neuroscience Byte. On the last byte, we talked about Wernicke's area, which we discussed had a role in speech comprehension, but I also alluded and mentioned Broca's area, which is basically the motor speech area. It's involved in speech production. Now, what does that actually mean? Well, it means that it's responsible for coordinating the muscles that you need to contract in order to generate speech. So the language centers of the brain, you know, speak in what we call a language code or a verbal

code, and it sends a word to Broca's area. And Broca's area's job is basically to make the motor pattern that generates that word. But it's a little bit more complicated than that because it also has to work around things like respiration. So it has to figure out when you're speaking how to coordinate all of this together. And you know, if you're thinking about this, your cheeks, your lips, your jaws, and the tongue. So Broca's area plays a key role in speech production and it's the motor speech area. It's literally the part that sends the commands to the primary motor cortex to move muscles to produce speech. But at the same time, in the background, it's helping regulate a few things that need to be regulated. Interestingly enough, people with damage to Broca's area have what's called Broca's aphasia.

And with Broca's aphasia, people can generate sounds, but they can't form words. So what you would hear is opposed to me speaking like I am now, you might hear, where people are trying to speak because they still have language. It's important to realize that. They still have language within their brain. They just literally can't generate the movement pattern to produce speech.

So that's Broca's aphasia. Another thing to remember too, which we talked about briefly on the last bite, was that Broca's area and Wernicke's area worked together. Originally, it was thought that these two brain areas were quite separate. Wernicke's area was speech comprehension and Broca's area was speech production. But modern theories of language within the brain or the neuroscience of language have come to realize that these two areas need to work together. And they also work with other language centers in the brain. Your brain isn't just produced and understood in these two regions. You need regions across the brain to be able to

produce language. Well, there's a bite on Broca's area. Remember, check out the website, if nothing else, thatneuroscienceguy.com. There's links to ways that you can support us financially. There's links to a bunch of other stuff. And of course, there's the blog now where I'll put up a little bit about Broca's area in a little picture so you can see where it is in the brain. My name is Olof Kregolsen and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you on Sunday for another full episode of the podcast.