Paul Broca

11 Key excerpts on "Paul Broca"

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  Fragments Of Neurological History

  • John M S Pearce(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • ICP

    (Publisher)

  Later, in 1878, he described the comparative neuroanatomy of the grand lobe limbique and the olfactory system. 3 In 1857 Broca married Adele Lugol (1835-1914), the daughter of Jean Lugol, inventor of Lugol's iodine solution. They had three children. In 1860 Broca founded the Societe d'Anthropologie, which became the base for discussions on aphasia. His interest in speech disorders grew during the 1860s, founded on his neuroanatomical and anthropological work. Broca was a lifelong republican and supported the 1848 revolution in Paris. After the Franco-Prussian war, he remained in Paris. He was a courageous and loyal man. 84 Paul Broca and Aphasia 85 In 1880 Broca was made a lifetime senator of the French republic — an honour bestowed on distinguished wise men, counsellors and physicians. On 8 July 1880 he died, probably as the result of myocardial infarction. Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) had proposed that every individual human trait had its location within the brain, evident in the visible skull and face. Hence bumps and shapes of the head would reveal the character and personality of the subject. This was to be the foundation of phrenology, popular for many years but finally discredited. 4 The neurology of language and its relation to the brain was proposed by Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796-1881). His clinical observations showed that disorders of speech were caused by abnormalities in the frontal lobes. 5 The precise localization remained uncertain. As a neurologist and researcher, Broca wrote copiously, in publications generally regarded as being of high quality. A classic 900-page monograph on aneurysms came from his pen. His interests were wide, and he did research on prehistoric surgical operations. He was also an early advocate of microscopy in the diagnosis of cancer, despite some opposition. But Broca is best known for the concept of functional localization of expressive speech to the left inferior frontal convolution.

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  The Science of Learning and Development in Education

  A Research-based Approach to Educational Practice

  • Minkang Kim, Derek Sankey(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  PART 1 THE SCIENCE OF LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 116 The role of brain lesions in understanding language Many of the early discoveries about the human brain have come from people who have suffered brain damage (lesions) and subsequently lost a particular ability. In regard to lan- guage, early discoveries were related to two different condi- tions that go by the general name of aphasia (or dysphasia). In the nineteenth century, the French neuroanatomist Paul Broca (1824–1880) studied two patients who had lost the ability to speak words, though they could still understand them. This is often referred to as expressive aphasia (or Broca’s aphasia). When they died it was discovered by autopsy that they had lesions in Brodmann areas 44 and 45, in the left hemisphere of the brain, which also became known as Broca’s area (see also Chapter 4) – but see the note on brain specialisation, below. A different from of aphasia, often referred to as Wernicke’s aphasia, was identified by the German neuroanato- mist Carl Wernicke (1848–1905). This condition, in which a patient loses the ability to un- derstand spoken or written language, results from lesions in both areas 22 and 39 in the left hemisphere, also known as Wernicke’s area (Figure 5.1). The study of brain lesions has assisted our understanding of language, but there are some important caveats that need to be noted. Most naturally occurring lesions, such as those resulting from a stroke, are not neatly restricted to small areas of the brain devoted to very specific tasks, such as recognising the orientation of lines in reading, but tend to be more widespread. Relating a particular lesion to a specific skill may therefore not be very precise and subsequent research is required to identify the actual site of impairment.

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  Cognitive Neuroscience of Natural Language Use

  • Roel M. Willems(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  8 Putting Broca’s region into context: fMRI evidence for a role in predictive language processing Line Burholt Kristensen & Mikkel Wallentin Abstract Broca’s region is known to play a key role in speech production as well as in the processing of language input. Still, the exact function (or functions) of Broca’s region remains highly disputed. Within the gen- erativist framework it has been argued that part of Broca’s region is dedicated to syntactical analysis. Others, however, have related Broca’s region activity to more domain-general processes, e.g. working memory load and argument hierarchy demands. We here present results that show how contextual cues completely alter the effects of syntax in behav- iour and in Broca’s region, and suggest that activation in this area reflects general linguistic processing costs or prediction error. We review the fMRI literature in the light of this theory. Introduction: the controversy over Broca’s region In 1861 Paul Broca presented the brain of one of his patients to the anthropological society in Paris. Before his death, this patient had displayed a severe speech deficit, being unable to say more than a single word, ‘Tan’, while apparently maintaining many of his other mental facul- ties (Broca, 1861). Broca found that the patient had a large lesion in the brain’s left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG). Since then, this area, now often referred to as Broca’s region, has been considered a key speech/language brain region. With the advent of cell-staining techniques, Korbinian Brodmann (Brodmann, 1909) found that the LIFG, based on the cytoarch- itecture, could be subdivided into distinct regions: Brodmann areas 44, 45 and 47 (BA 44/45/47). The subregions are depicted in Plate 8.1 (see colour plate section).

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  A History of the Brain

  From Stone Age surgery to modern neuroscience

  • Andrew P. Wickens(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Despite his financial loss, Bouillaud received further support from his son-in-law Ernest Aubertin. Also working in Paris, Aubertin was searching for new aphasic patients and came across an interesting case in 1861. The patient had blown away the best part of his left frontal cranium during a suicide attempt after shooting himself in the head. While the injury had apparently left both speech and intellect intact, Aubertin discovered he could abruptly stop the patient in mid-sentence by applying upward pressure to the exposed frontal lobes with a spatula. However, speech returned immediately after the compression ceased. Aubertin described the patient to the recently formed Société d’Anthropologie in Paris, using it to support the theory of language localisation in the frontal lobes. However, for many, the findings again remained inconclusive – not least when it was known that some patients with left-sided frontal lobe injuries exhibited normal speech. However, one person listening to the debate was Paul Broca, the founder of the Société, and one of the most respected doctors in France. Although he had been relatively indifferent about the long running debate on the localisation of language, Broca was soon to come across his first aphasic patient. It was an encounter that would radically change people’s attitudes to cortical localisation.

  Broca is now recognised as one of the most eminent brain investigators of the nineteenth century. Born in the small town of Sainte-Foy-la-Grand, close to Bordeaux, Broca was the son of a doctor who served with distinction at the Battle of Waterloo. He graduated in medicine from the University of Paris when just 20 years old, and specialised in surgery, working in several Paris hospitals, before rising to the Chair of Surgical Pathology in 1868. Although often remembered for his anthropological research (he was the first to describe Cro-Magnon man), Broca also made several important medical discoveries. These included recognising the venous spread of cancer, the nutritional causes of rickets, and the nature of degeneration in muscular dystrophy. He also wrote a 900 page book on aneurysms and pioneered the use of the microscope to detect early tumour formation. Much later in his career (1788) Broca identified a large gray mass of different structures, which he called the le grand lobe limbique (the limbic lobe) nestled under the cerebral cortex.1

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  Introducing Linguistics

  Theoretical and Applied Approaches

  • Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, John W. Schwieter(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  For most right-handed people, language is lateralized in the left hemisphere. While it is impossible to pinpoint the exact location of language in the brain, we do know that there are at least two key areas that are important for language production and comprehension. These include Broca’s area named after French surgeon Paul Broca in 1861, and Wernicke’s area, named after German physician Carl Wernicke in 1874. To read more about how being left- or right-handed affects language lateralization , read ‘Delving Deeper’ in Chapter 15’s resources on the website to accompany this book at www.cambridge.org/introducing-linguistics. We will return to our discussion on Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas when we explore how damage to these parts leads to language impairment in Section 15.4. For now, we can say that researchers have come a long way in brain research since the 1800s and we now know a wealth of information about what the human brain does with language. For example, we know that: • Broca’s area is involved largely in speech production; • The primary motor cortex is needed for movement in speech and articulation; • The primary somatosensory cortex is used in connecting senses with language; • The inferior parietal lobule is involved in the perception of faces and facial emotions; • The primary visual cortex along with the angular gyrus are essential for reading; • Wernicke’s area is important for speech comprehension; and • The primary auditory area is essential for hearing speech sounds. Figure 15.6 illustrates where these areas are located in the brain. Wernicke’s area Broca’s area Primary motor cortex Primary auditory area Primary visual cortex Inferior parietal lobule Primary somatosensory cortex Figure 15.6 Primary Brain Areas Involved in Language 544 Neurolinguistics 15.3 Methods of Studying the Brain What are some of the ways we can study language in the brain? Before the birth of technology, we relied mostly on autopsies to learn about language and the brain.

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  Language Communication and the Brain

  A Neuropsychological Study

  • Mariusz Maruszewski, Grace W. Shugar(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The day following his decease, the patient's brain was exhibited at a meeting of the Society; little interest, however, was evoked. Shortly afterward, Broca demonstrated a second case with the same syndrome: speech disorder with a lesion in the left frontal lobe. Now a fiery controversy arose. Broca's own conclusion, based on his two cases, was that speech is localized in the left hemisphere in the posterior divisions of the second and third frontal convolutions; Bouillard and other supporters of Gall's theory maintained that Broca's cases com-prised evidence for the phrenological theory of localization (cf. Brain, 1965; Critch-ley, 1964; Head, 1920). Thus began the key discussion in the history of research into the relation of speech and brain. The issue was whether there are any special centres correlated with the 22 II. HISTORY OF RESEARCH ON THE RELATION BETWEEN SPEECH AND BRAIN human capacity to use language, or whether this capacity is a function of the brain as a whole. In the period we are now describing, this debate had a highly passionate flavour. As Head (1920) writes, speech localization became a political issue. Representatives of the older conservative school defended the theory of integral brain function, while the young liberals and republicans took sides with Broca's contention and the locali-zation theory. This polemic raged for a number of years throughout the scientific world of Paris. The significance of Broca's discovery was that, for the first time, it was strictly es-tablished (according to contemporary scientific canons) that a lesion in a given part of the brain produced a given type of speech disorder. This finding inspired many investigators to attempt new descriptions of speech disturbances and to search for the destroyed cerebral areas responsible for them. We shall mention the most note-worthy of these studies. 2 In 1867, Ogle described the different forms of writing dis-order and introduced the term agraphia to cover them.

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  Introduction to Neurolinguistics

  • Prafull Dhondopant Kulkarni(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Society Publishing

    (Publisher)

  As the word has evolved to be utilized, ‘Broca’s aphasia’ refers to a larger variety of language deficits than Broca himself specified. In addition to substantial speech production issues, individuals with severe damage to Broca’s region sometimes exhibit evidence of agrammatism, an apparent selective loss or impairment of grammatical terms and inflectional morphemes. Overt agrammatism is seen in the speech of Broca’s aphasics, whose production problems aren’t all that severe that they cannot produce multi-word sentences. 3.4.1. The Classical Account: the Broca-Wernicke-Lichtheim (BWL) Model Wernicke’s linguistic area is located on the left superior temporal gyrus, in the auditory association area surrounding the primary auditory cortex, but it is often inaccurately assumed to broaden to the posterior region of the temporal lobes supra-marginal gyrus and even to the angular gyrus at the intersection of the parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes. The closeness of Wernicke’s area to the primary auditory cortex is matched by Broca’s area to the primary motor cortex, which controls the articulating and vocal communication muscles. Previously, it was thought that the auditory/acoustic analysis procedures for word recognition and the articulatory engrams (memory traces) for speech production were kept in these two physically separate regions, which are linked directly via a subcortical fiber tract known as the arcuate fasciculus. The complementary symptom patterns of Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia. To some extent, this complementarily stems from the proximity of the various language centers to their surrounding motor and sensory regions. The Neuroanatomy of Language 75 However, the contrasting pattern of deficits projects from speech into the language itself: Broca’s aphasia into grammatical impairments of language production and perception; Wernicke’s aphasia into lexical deficiency symptoms. Everything in the cerebral cortex is interrelated, as Wernicke recognized.

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  History of Neurology

  • Stanley Finger, Francois Boller, Kenneth L. Tyler(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier

    (Publisher)

  Broca helped define a role for the frontal lobe – and, more particularly, the role of the left frontal lobe – in speech production. Wernicke offered an under-standing of the role of the left temporal lobe in speech comprehension and advanced the view that language functions involve specialized cortical regions intercon-nected by white matter pathways. Near the close of the century, Dejerine affirmed a key role for a portion of the left parietal lobe (angular gyrus) in reading and writ-ing, and provided an anatomical model to accommodate the fascinating disorder of alexia without agraphia (also referred to as pure word blindness or pure alexia). Table 37.1 gives landmark publications on disorders of reading and writing during this formative era. PRELUDE TO BROCA: BEFORE 1861 Broca’s early reports on aphemia are a convenient launching point for historical considerations of alexia and agraphia. However, the more general issue of cor-tical localization arose even earlier. At the dawn of the 19th century, the doctrine that the cerebrum operated as a functional whole was challenged by Franz Gall (1758–1828) and his phrenological heirs. Working primarily in Vienna and Paris, this neuroanatomist combined clinical observations with skillful post-mortem dissections of the brain, where he looked for signs of pathology or anatomical variations (Gall and Spurzheim, 1810; Gall, 1825). Based on correlative stu-dies, Gall suggested that the cerebrum and cerebellum were composed of discrete organs, each subserving an intellectual, psychological, or moral propensity. To give one relevant, well-known example, Gall (1825) observed that people with prominent eyes tended to excel at memory for words, and he viewed this promi-nence as an external indication of development of brain areas behind the two orbits, which included the organ of word memory and language sense. He did not propose separate organs for reading or writing.

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  Traumatic Aphasia

  Its Syndromes, Psychology and Treatment

  • Alexander R. Luria(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  THE ORGANIZATION OF BRAIN FUNCTIONS AND PROBLEMS OF APHASIA A complete understanding of the mechanisms of aphasia and a clear interpretation of the studies in this field can be achieved only if one keeps in mind the theoretical conceptions which have underlain the study of speech disorders in the past. Since these conceptions have determined the positions from which various investigators have conducted their analyses of aphasia, there is every reason to preface the description of our work with a historical survey, though it be only a short one. The history of the study of aphasia goes back more than a hundred years and consists of a long struggle to achieve a scientific conception of the structure of mental functions and of their localization in the cerebral cortex. It is only natural that at each stage views from which various investigators proceeded were not identical and that progress in this area was intimately bound to the development of their views. When, in 1861, Broca formulated for the first time the position that destruction of the motor aspect of speech is related to damage of a limited area of the brain he was proceeding from a well defined conception of brain structure and of the localization of functions in the brain cortex. According to this conception, which received support from the anatomical findings of Betz and the physiological in-vestigations of Fritsch and Hitzig, the cortex is a highly differentiated system of areas whose cells possess very specific functions. At this time, when the first anatomico-physiological studies of brain activity were differentiating areas of the cortex which have strictly defined physiological (afferent or efferent) functions, clinical investigators were beginning to distinguish areas which appeared to be unique depots for complex mental processes and consequently to have definite psychological functions.

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  A History of Neuropsychology

  • Julien Bogousslavsky, François Boller, Makoto Iwata, Julien, Bogousslavsky, François, Boller, Makoto, Iwata, Julien Bogousslavsky(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • S. Karger

    (Publisher)

  In 1861, members of the Anthropological Society of Paris, co-founded by Broca the year before, debated the relation between intelligence and brain size. Noting that the brain is a com plex organ, a debate participant – Bouillaud’s son-in-law Ernest Auburtin (1825–1893) – asked whether different parts of the brain should be considered separately. He mentioned a patient who had lost speech but who retained the ability to understand and, further, he predicted that an autopsy would eventually confirm a softening (stroke) within the ante-rior lobes in accordance with Bouillaud’s ideas [8]. By remarkable coincidence, a man with similar symptoms was admitted to Broca’s surgical service at the Bicêtre hospital 8 days later. Years before, he had lost his ability to speak, and he was paralyzed on his right side. He died of infection shortly thereafter, and Broca reported clinical and autopsy findings to the Anthropological Society [1]. His pa-tient “understood almost all that one said to him” (p 236), and Broca interpreted this finding as evidence that intelligence was spared. The autopsy showed that “the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere was softened in most of its extent,” particularly affecting “the middle part of the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere” (p 237) [1]. This localization, ac-cording to Broca, supported Bouillaud’s view that anterior lobes were affected when speech was lost. Broca used the term aphemia ( aphemie ) to describe the disorder of articulate lan-guage shown by his patient [9]. As more cases of aphemia were reported by Broca and others, he suggested that brain injury causing aphemia consistently affected one region of the anterior lobes (the posterior portion of the third frontal convolution [gyrus]) on one side of the brain (the left side) [10]. Broca noted that the left cerebral hemisphere also controlled movements responsible for right handedness and suggested, by way of analogy, that “we speak with the left hemisphere” (p 384) [11].

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  Neural Models of language Processes

  • Michael Arbib(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  The correlation of lesion site with symptom-complex and the evolution of both over time, constitute the link with neural structures which is most frequently made today. Caplan argues against the expla-natory adequacy of associating a function with a grossly defined area of the brain, such as d convolution. Regardless of its explanatory adequacy, such associations exist as Kertesz, Lèvine, and many others have demonstrated, The challenge is to explicate abnormalities in terms of deficits in normal functions (Kertesz briefly sketches such an analysis, but clearly this is an area for considerable speculation and investigation), and at the same time to ask what it is about the neural make-up of an area that causes that area to be responsible for a particular linguistic repre-sentation and function. The former statement leads to the information processing and linguistic models of Parts II and III, the latter to the considerations of neuro-science and brain theory of Part V. Thus clinical theories, though focusing on aspects of language that are based on therapeutic concerns, lead in two directions toward contact with more basic science. REFERENCES Chomsky, N., and Lasnik, H. (1977). Filters and control. Linguistic inquiry, 7, 425-504. This page intentionally left blank 14 The Neuropathologicaf Basis of Broca's Aphasia and Its Implications for the Cerebral Control of Speech l David N. Levine Eric Sweet Sudden loss of speech, associated with right hemiplegia, is a very common syndrome, and there are few neurologists who have not seen many such cases. The speech loss, which may be total at first, undergoes a variable degree of improvement over the subsequent days and weeks. Some patients regain no speech, but may moan or cry out to attract attention. Others regain the use of a limited repertoire of neologisms, words, and short phrases that are used in a stereotyped and perseverative manner to respond to questions.

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