Talk:Broca's area

Request to restore link to Wernicke’s Area — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.210.154.76 (talk) 15:05, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Generative Grammar
So, I don't edit often, but I thought this didn't belong here:

"Moreover, Broca's area has revealed to be sensitive to the distinction between "possible" vs. "impossible" languages as determined by principles of generative grammar as in the works coordinated by Andrea Moro "

It was (previously) the last sentence of the first paragraph under #Language Comprehension. The problem isn't the statement, but the source. The source is an entire book, no page numbers or even chapters listed. Just the whole effin thing. From what I know, that's not how sources work. The reason I looked at the source was because of the matter-of-factness of the statement. Generative Grammar is a topic that is controversial in Cognitive Science and Neruopsychology right now, something which has not been proven nor disproven. If there was going to be a statement about it, I would expect it to have far more nuance (hence my source check), but this makes it seem like something that has all been well-proven, due to the implication the sentence gives and it's location in the paragraph (the paragraph being a list of, for the most part, facts). My feeling is that this was thrown in there (it is a bit of a non-sequitur when you step back from the rest of it, and it's only a single sentence) to promote the author and his book (funny how the sentence lists the author in the article, instead of just the source, unlike any of the other sources, no?). If it's for some reason not that, then it could be someone from specific universities or research institutes that support the idea of Universal/Generative Grammar and are trying to bias the opinion of the reader that it is a foregone conclusion instead of something that's the subject of very active research (yes, there are actually people who cheer-lead over this shit, perhaps due in part to the relative fame of Noam Chomsky). Seeming quite out of place, I took it out of the article and put it in hear for the rest of you all to decide.

Is
Is this the same thing as the motor speech area? If so, we should probably include it, simply because eponyms are no longer in vogue. --Mauvila 11:47, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with that term, but some quick googling implies they might be the same. On the other hand, 'motor speech area' is a misleading term, because Broca's area doesn't have much to do with motor control. Masily box 14:50, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

"Yes... ah... Monday... er... Dad and Peter H... (his own name), and Dad.... er... hospital... and ah... Wednesday... Wednesday, nine o'clock... and oh... Thursday... ten o'clock, ah doctors... two... an' doctors... and er... teeth... yah."

Peter has some type of an appointment with a dentist and someone has to go to a doctor or came from or is involved with.. yep :) --Cyberman 20:59, 5 October 2005 (UTC) Scientists say Broca's Area when damaged is serve to the way we talk. Broca disected 8 brains in total of people (already dead) who couldn't speak. He found that their brains were all damaged servely in the same area. Therefore this is why we call that area today Broca's area

Too many run on sentences, when your introducing a new cocept it doesnt help if you can't remember what the beginning of the sentence was talking about.-Rooktje

This is coming long after intial dialogue...but here goes. Broca's is part of what one MIGHT refer to as a "motor speech area". The fact is that Broca's area is not a rigid area in every brain, but it is located mainly in what is called the motor association cortex of the brain. This area is sort of like the "mixer" that turns the butter an sugar into cookie dough for lack of a better metaphor. It is thought that the association areas of the brain are where memories for different things are stored. Wernicke orignially posited that Broca's area governed "motor memories" and this seems to be the case. Damage to Broca's shows the following symptoms in varying intensities and combinations:Non-fluent speech, slow,halting speech, loss of ability to "find" certain words, difficulty pronouncing words and loss of prosody (agrammatism, anomia, articulation difficulty). Athough the right hemisphere is ultimately responsible for prosody, for some reason Broca's (on the left) seems to be connected as well. True apraxia would be damage to the ventral primary motor cortex. Broca's aphasia is not a dysfuntcion of the actual motor connections as they pertain to the mechanical operation of the lips, tongue, etc; but to part of the motor association cortex that stores motor memories and allows their retrieval. It is in an area that works to integrate all the different aspects of the brain's motor systems.Cherokeechild 00:03, 14 May 2007 (UTC)cherokeechild

Sorry for the addition, but I think there may be a mistake in the last paragraph. As I recall, functional studies by Brown (2005) found that people who stutter have GREATER/increased activation of neuronal pathways in Broca's area...not less. You might check data as reported by Neil Carlson, Physiology of Behavior (2007), I think.Cherokeechild 00:16, 14 May 2007 (UTC)cherokeechild

""Yes... ah... Monday... er... Dad and Peter H... ......." My Psych textbook quotes this differently. Basically, alot of the er's and ah's are gone... and he says 'Dad and Dick'... 203.55.195.106 06:51, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Broca's is not simply an organ for syntax
Have removed the universal grammar section. Very few people (maybe Grodzinsky, but I can't think of any others of note) now believe that this area is dedicated to parsing syntax, which is what this section would lead you to conclude. This part of the IFG participates in hundreds of cognitive functions, not all of them language related. As far as language itself is concerned, fMRI investigations have shown an involvement in semantic processing, even at the single word level - i.e. in the absence of any syntactic processing demand. Crudely put, current opinion seems to be that the anterior part (BA45) is involved in (probably multimodal) semantic processing, wheras the posterior part (BA44) appears to play a role in phonological processing. Even more crudely put, the front bit of Broca's probably helps us deal with the meaning of language, the back bit helps us deal with the sounds of language Terry Toweling 22:18, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Broca's area is equivalent to Motor Speech center.. should add the link. -- econner 29 November 2007

I don't believe you can pinpoint Broca's area to any particular language feature. Yes, it is primarily motor speech - but, it probably is involved in other functions at a level we don't completely understand. --Anthropos65 (talk) 15:21, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
 * It's not "equivalent to Motor Speech center." Actually, most of the recent work is leaning towards calling BA44 and BA45 a working memory area, and the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) the real locus of most syntactic operations; you just see activation in Broca's area as well because the complex syntactic operations (gap-filling, etc.) require you to keep a moved constituent active in your working memory for a while.  To tell you the truth, I'm a bit surprised that there's no mention of working memory in this article, and maybe I will try to add some later (Dronkers et al 2000 and Friederici 2002 have some good stuff on that; sorry, don't have the full citation handy).
 * Also, remember to take this all with a grain of salt; Broca's Area is not just one homogenous blob, but is a region which has plenty of heterogeneity in it and has different parts that do different things. I will be more familiar with the literature on that within about a month or so. Polit i zer talk / contribs 19:32, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

It could have been present already in the common ancestor of humans and chimps
Quoting from Science Daily:
 * In the new study, the researchers non-invasively scanned the brains of three chimpanzees as they gestured and called to a person in request for food that was out of their reach. Those chimps showed activation in the brain region corresponding to Broca's area and in other areas involved in complex motor planning and action in humans, the researchers found. - Science Daily, February 28, "Chimps May Have A 'Language-ready' Brain"

--Extremophile (talk) 13:57, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Article
Might be useful, might not be: Polit i zer talk / contribs 19:32, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Areas for improvement
I've decided to grace this article with my presence sometime in the near future. In the meantime, for anyone reading along, here are some of the main issues that I think need to addressed (these are things that I will be addressing in my edits to come, but I'm listing them here just in case anyone wants to get started early, or in case anyone disagrees). Polit i zer talk / contribs 19:07, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
 * The section Case study is totally unjustified, it gives undue weight to a single study. Will get rid of it and integrate that reference into other areas.
 * Aphasia section needs rewritten; current version focuses mostly on comparison with other aphasias, which belongs (and is already present in) the main Aphasia article. Section should say more about Broca's aphasia and doesn't need the table (which is simply copied from here anyway).
 * Broca's area revisited is also just about one study (Dronkers et al, 2007) and should be rewritten as a summary of relevant literature, not just the one study. Another relevant paper is
 * Stuff I mentioned above about how there needs to be more coverage of the literature that suggests Broca's area is a workspace of working memory, rather than a syntax-specific or even language-specific area. Relevant papers include:
 * And, of course, for a counterpoint: (and some earlier papers cited in this one)
 * And, of course, for a counterpoint: (and some earlier papers cited in this one)
 * And, of course, for a counterpoint: (and some earlier papers cited in this one)


 * I'll admit I'm guilty of not reading this talk page before making some of my edits. I have to agree with a lot of what this editor says, although the presence of information on aphasia (especially Broca's aphasia) is not contraindicated on this page just because this information appears elsewhere in the encyclopedia.  I do agree that refining the section to more specifically elucidate the nature of Broca's aphasia is probably warranted, but I do not think it is possible to do so without mentioning and comparing the other forms of aphasia to Broca's aphasia.  As an aside, the section on the origin of language probably should be truncated; I made a number of additions to this area which were (in my mind justifiably) removed, and a link to the main article on the origins of language along with a very short stub describing, briefly, the relevence of Broca's area to the discussion would suffice in my opinion.  Spiral5800 (talk) 06:20, 17 January 2011 (UTC)!

nu mata sa wayay???????? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 182.180.67.57 (talk) 07:34, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Edit reverted
I have undone this addition for the following reasons: Also, for what it's worth, the link provided was dead. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 02:48, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
 * It's not clear what it means. "This area is also crucially involved in the recognition of recursive rules, the only one admitted in human languages"---what does "the only one" refer to? And what is the nature of the region's involvement?
 * Citing a full book without giving page or chapter numbers is not really helpful, as it would be difficult to find the relevant passage to verify this.
 * If this is a claim based on one experiment, then it doesn't belong in the article anyway; for a topic like this, we really should be limiting ourselves to sources more like review articles, where the claims are widely replicated and are agreed upon. Mentioning every neuroscience result that implicates Broca's area (or any region) in anything would quickly get beyond the scope of the article.

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Broca's Aphasia Caused By Vitamin B12 Aphasia?
From May 2010 until November 2018 I've been experiencing increasingly frequent and increasingly severe Neurological symptoms: Brain Seizures, Dissociative Fugues - more commonly known as Fugue States - Broca's Aphasia in both my speech and my writing, and just in my last episode, really loud Tinnitus - ringing in my ears - severe dizziness leading to severe nausea, and numbness in my feet and lips. Four CT Scans, an MRI and a bunch of physical stroke exams which test for asymmetries in one's movements or physical strength make abundantly clear that I've never had brain cancer, a stroke, hemorrhage nor blood clot.

All my doctors other than just last week my new Neurologist have been totally stymied.

This is so far speculation on the parts of myself and my Neurologist. She suggested I have B12 Anemia due to my last ER visit having complained of numbness in the soles of both my feet as well as both my lips. Such Anemia is known to cause numbness in one's feet and hands.

If this turns out to be the case for me, in my case that's likely to be Pernicious Anemia, as my Great-Grandfather - my mother's father's father - died of it before the discovery of Liver Therapy. It's three inventors shared the 1934 Medicine Nobel. Further research found that the essential component of liver was at first red blood cells, then the Methylcobalamin form of Vitamin B12, and at some point the ultimate cause of PA was found to be a deficiency of a stomach enzyme called "Intrinsic Factor". If there's not enough IF in the stomach, the small intestine won't be able to absorb Methylcobalamin. The best treatment is now Vitamin B12 injections, daily at first, then once per week then once per month for the rest of one's life. I'm told that just some but not all of those with PA respond to 3,000 ug doses of oral Methylcobalamin tablets. Note that the US Recommanded Daily Allowance is just 2.4 ug.

So far I've had just a blood test for Methylmalonic Acid, which will be high if B12 is low. My own interpretation is that this test was inconclusive - I still await my Neurologist's interpretation - but there are six or eight other tests, the most-definitive being a bone marrow biopsy which would reveal any inability of the marrow to produce red blood cells.

172.58.40.170 (talk) 22:05, 12 December 2018 (UTC) User_Talk:MichaelCrawford

What do Mirror Neurons have to do with Broca's Area?
I don't understand why there is a section on Mirror Neurons in this article. Nothing in that section says anything about Broca's area. Also, it seems especially inappropriate given that its under the main section titled "Functions" which is supposed to be about the functions of Broca's area. I'll concede that given our very tentative understanding of the brain and language you could make a case that Mirror Neurons are important to language and hence Broca's area but no more or less than many other concepts (e.g, the theory from Lakoff and others that somatosensory processing is essential to language, or the recent work that Chomsky talks about in his book with Berwick where he identifies pathways that are hypothesized to support recursion). Can someone justify why we need to mention Mirror Neurons in this article and if so edit that section so the relevance is clear? If not I think that section should be deleted and will do so after a while if no one comes up with a justification. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 22:24, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm removing the Mirror Neuron section. For one thing, that section was speculation anyway. There is no strong evidence that mirror neurons play a significant role in human language. But more importantly that section said nothing about Broca's area which is what this article is about. Here is the text that I removed:

Mirror neurons
Communication, both verbal and nonverbal, requires that the interacting individuals stay "tuned" to one another. Mirror neurons were discovered in the 1990s in frontal area F5 of the monkey cortex. These neurons are active during execution of object-related hand actions, but they are also active, importantly, when the monkey is just observing similar acts. For example, the mirror neurons are activated when the monkey takes a raisin from a tray and also when he views another monkey or the human experimenter doing the same. No information is yet available about possible hemispheric lateralization of the monkey mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons have visuomotor properties, being sensitive to goal-related motor acts, but they can also be activated by sounds that imply actions. Importantly, the mirror neurons do not only react to visual input and then project, via some transformational step, to motor-output-related neurons but are also part of a system that forms a neuronal representation of the observed motor acts. Similar to F5, the rostral part of the inferior parietal cortex contains neurons that are active during action observation and execution; this region receives input from the STS, which is known to contain neurons responding to biological motion. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 14:45, 10 April 2019 (UTC)