That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites-Wernicke's Area

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Next in our series of Neuroscience Bites, we discuss Wernicke's Area: a brain area important for producing and understanding speech. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kergolsen 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. This week, I'm going to tell you about a really cool region of the brain called Wernicke's area. Now, Wernicke's area was discovered by Dr. Carl Wernicke, and he discovered it by observing some things in some patients he is working with. Basically, what he found is that people with damage to Wernicke's area, and this is a part of the brain, it's a little bit hard to identify precisely because it varies a bit from person to person, but it's always around the superior temporal

cortex near the temporal parietal junction. Anyway, what Dr. Wernicke found is that people with damage to this region of the brain had two principal problems. One, when they generated speech, their speech basically didn't make sense. They were using made up words and combinations of sounds that weren't intelligible. And two, they had trouble understanding speech. So when someone was talking to them, they couldn't really understand what was going on. Based on these observations, Dr. Wernicke came up with a proposition. Wernicke's area was the part of the brain that was responsible for speech comprehension. Now, specifically what he proposed was that signals came in through the ears to the primary auditory cortex. The primary auditory cortex is a lot like

the primary visual cortex, which receives signals from the eyes, and then those signals need to be interpreted. So the primary auditory cortex receives signals from the ears, which need to be interpreted or translated into language. And that's where Wernicke's area came in. Wernicke's area was receiving this auditory code from the primary auditory cortex, and it was responsible for translating that into comprehensible language. Now, it turns out this isn't really true. There's another area we're going to talk about next week called Broca's area. And it turns out that both Wernicke's area and Broca's area play a role in speech comprehension. And even more than that, speech comprehension actually involves a wide network across the brain and not just one little region, Wernicke's area.

Now, if you want to see a picture of where Wernicke's area is, you can go to the blog on thatneuroscienceguy.com and you will see a blog entry where there's a picture of where Wernicke's area is, you can go to the blog on thatneuroscienceguy.com, and you will see a blog entry where there's a picture of where Wernicke's area is, and there's a little description about its functions. I'll be doing this for all the bites, just so you can see where in the brain I'm talking about. Anyway, that's it for this bite on Wernicke's area. Thank you so much for listening. Remember, check out the website. There's links to all sorts of stuff tied to the podcast, and I'll see you on Sunday for another. Remember, check out the website. There's links to all sorts of stuff tied to the podcast. And I'll see you on Sunday

for another full episode of the podcast. My name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm that neuroscience guy. Thank you so much for listening.