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Broca and the Birth of Localization Theories

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The Broca-Wernicke Doctrine

Abstract

In 2009, Craig Bennett and his co-workers put a mature Atlantic salmon in an MRI scanner and showed it a series of photographs [1]. The (dead) salmon had been instructed to determine the emotion of photographed people during MR scanning. Much to everybody’s surprise, three activated areas were found exactly in the brain cavity of the salmon, as shown in Fig. 1.1. The results of this experiment were presented at a human brain mapping conference in Toronto [1]. Statistically speaking, the images made a strong point that the salmon was engaged in a cognitive task. The poster, of course, argued differently and pointed to the dangers of modern functional neuroimaging techniques.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For more details, see a paper of Tizard [7].

  2. 2.

    In 1848, Bouillaud famously offered 500 francs to anyone who could present him with a patient with a deep lesion in the frontal lobes without speech deficits.

  3. 3.

    Note that Broca suggests here that the inferior part of the precentral gyrus was also lesioned. This implies that pathology had also affected the ventral premotor cortex, an area that is increasingly recognized in speech production.

  4. 4.

    See also Thiebaut de Schotten (2015), who used an atlas of white matter connections (obtained from diffusion tractography) to estimate more precisely the subcortical damage in the brain of Leborgne [22].

  5. 5.

    For a good introduction to this controversy, see the paper of Rogalsky (2008) [32].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurosurgery, St Elisabeth-Tweesteden Hospital, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Geert-Jan Rutten

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Rutten, GJ. (2017). Broca and the Birth of Localization Theories. In: The Broca-Wernicke Doctrine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54633-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54633-9_1

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