Broca’s region has been in the news ever since scientists first hit upon the idea that particular cognitive functions can be localized to parts of the cerebral cortex. Its discoverer, Paul Broca, was one of the first scientists to argue that there is a direct connection between a concrete piece of behavior—in this case, the use of language, or what Broca called “articulated speech”—and a specific cortical region. Today, Broca’s region is probably the most famous part of the human brain: it is featured in virtually every introductory psychology course and textbook and in many,
if not all, introductory anatomy and linguistics courses, and for over a century, it has persisted as the focus of intense research and much debate. The name has even penetrated popular culture, serving as the title for a best-selling popular science book by Carl Sagan.
This region is not famous for nothing: as language is one of the most distinctive human traits, it would seem to follow that the cognitive mechanisms that support it are quite complex, and the tissues in which these mechanisms are housed have interesting characteristics and important implications for how brain function relates to behavior. Thus, Broca’s region features prominently in the study of brain–behavior relations.
The first studies of Broca’s region focused on language pathologies caused by brain lesions. The results of this early work by Broca, Wernicke, and their contemporaries captivated the public’s imagination. Among the language pathologies, Broca’s aphasia attracted attention as no other disorder ever had. It even made it to Broadway, through the protagonist of Arthur Kopit’s play Wings—stroke victim Emily Stilson, an aphasic patient whose compelling plight, as described in the play’s synopsis, is that she is “an exaviatrix who loses speech . . . and slowly regains power of language and life.”
Broca’s discoveries were also an important, driving force behind the more general effort to relate complex behavior to particular parts of the cerebral cortex, which, significantly, produced the first brain maps. Incorrect paths such as phrenology notwithstanding, during the heyday of Broca’s work, research aimed at identifying the cerebral localization of cognitive function was flourishing and the study of aphasic syndromes was the flagship of neuropsychology. During these early years, the investigation into brain and behavior was based almost solely upon lesion studies. Although researchers were able to analyze lesions at the level of brain macroscopy and functional deficit, this is, unfortunately, where their analyses ended. On an anatomical level, researchers were not aware of the underlying principles of cellular dysfunction and disconnectivity, and of the huge amount of variability among different subjects. On a behavioral level, their distinctions were crude because they were not aware of the structural properties of language and cross-linguistic variation.
Although much has been discovered since Broca claimed that the region contains “the faculty of articulated language,” even today, these problems have not been completely solved. Technological advancements have made more detailed studies possible, but there is still no general agreement among anatomists on what constitutes the underlying microstructure of Broca’s region or even on the name of the region itself.
In the early twentieth century, anatomists distinguished a strict sense of Broca’s region from the more general sense of it. Just to make matters perfectly confusing, later researchers also referred to this particular piece of neural tissue as Broca’s area and Broca’s complex. The term “Broca’s area” seems to be misleading because it suggests that it is a single entity, characterized by a certain homogeneity in structure, connectivity, and function (almost as if it were a Brodmann area), whereas it has become increasingly clear that it actually includes cortical areas with different functional specializations and connectivity.
In an analogous situation, there is also no general agreement on how the cognitive functions related to Broca’s region should be characterized. It is, however, quite clear that modality-based divisions of the type found in standard neurology texts—speaking, understanding, repeating, naming, and so on—are not good enough units of measure and that creating divisions based on either psychological mechanisms or linguistically motivated concepts also fails to tell the whole story.
If it is so difficult to come to an understanding of each of these things alone, then how can we so easily easily claim that the anatomy and functional role of this part of the brain are related to each other? Initially established as the exclusive domain of clinical neurologists, the study of brain/language relations increasingly required deeper expertise in specialized domains. The field was transformed when psychologists entered with experimental methods and linguists entered with analytic categories and theoretical conceptions.
Later, when new methods has been developed, neuroscientists, biomedical engineers, and computer scientists became interested. Today, particularly as a result of important advances made in neuroimaging during the past two decades, Broca’s region and, for that matter, all language areas are being investigated from every angle from which we can manage to approach them.
The careers of the editors of this volume illustrate the phenomenon: Our long-term research program has always focused on Broca’s region, and we currently use fMRI as a method of investigation. However, while one of us studies the structure of this region primarily by looking at cells, cellular architecture, cortical layers, and borders, the other editor is primarily concerned with words, phrases, sentences, and grammatical rules and the way in which they are instantiated in neural tissue.
Indeed, as the volume of research into the relations between brain and language has created several communities, each importing its own concepts, methods, and considerations, we thought that it was time to stop and reflect together, and that is the purpose of this book. In it, we tried to do what is generally considered to be nearly impossible: to mix intellectual traditions and cultures and to juxtapose rather disparate bodies of knowledge, styles of reasoning, and forms of argumentation. At the same time, we made every effort to produce a book that is both relevant and accessible to a broad audience.
To this end, we invited scientists with diverse backgrounds to contribute their particular take at the Broca’s Region Workshop, hoping that a coherent and perhaps even a novel picture would emerge. Although the participants share a special interest in Broca’s region, their backgrounds and approaches— neuroanatomy, physiology, evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, clinical neurology, functional imaging, speech and language research, computational biology, and psychological, neurological, and theoretical linguistics—represent all the myriad angles from which we currently approach Broca’s region.
We met at the Forschungszentrum in Juelich, Germany, on June 4 through 6, 2004. As one would expect, the meeting was unusual. At times it became tense, but it was never dull. We are happy to report that it reflected a genuine effort on everyone’s part to listen, accommodate, and, most of all, understand.
We offer the readers of this volume the product of our Broca’s Region Workshop—contributions made by the participants and their research teams, amended after they were presented to the workshop’s diverse audience. To underscore the richness of viewpoints contained herein and to give readers an idea of the level of interaction that took place, we have included parts of the discussion that we recorded during the workshop. Because Broca’s region is such an historically significant concept and rich area, we added a collection of classic and recent-yet-classic papers. Along with cutting-edge science, we wish to remind readers of the celebrated past from which much may be learned. These historical chapters include the first two papers written by Paul Broca, as well as some work by two of the most important neurologists of the nineteenth century, Carl Wernicke and John Hughlings-Jackson. We also included parts of twentieth-century papers by Korbinian Brodmann, Norman Geschwind, Harold Goodglass, Roman Jakobson, Jay Mohr, and Arnold Pick.
The resulting volume, we believe, reflects the state of the art. We hope that it will stimulate more interdisciplinary work, as the project called “Broca’s region,” which encompasses the study of brain/language relations, is far from being finished.
We are grateful to the speakers/contributors, who helped bring the workshop and book to life. We were supported by Oxford University Press, with Catharine Carlin at the wheel; by the Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH, the chairman of its board of directors, Joachim Treusch, and the director of its Institute of Medicine, Karl Zilles; and by the Centre for Research on Language, Brain, and Mind at McGill University, and its director, Shari Baum. We would also like to thank Katie Clark and Andrea Santi for their help. Without these individuals and organizations, neither the workshop nor the book would ever have happened. Their help and generosity were invaluable in creating and carrying out this project. - Preface -
if not all, introductory anatomy and linguistics courses, and for over a century, it has persisted as the focus of intense research and much debate. The name has even penetrated popular culture, serving as the title for a best-selling popular science book by Carl Sagan.
This region is not famous for nothing: as language is one of the most distinctive human traits, it would seem to follow that the cognitive mechanisms that support it are quite complex, and the tissues in which these mechanisms are housed have interesting characteristics and important implications for how brain function relates to behavior. Thus, Broca’s region features prominently in the study of brain–behavior relations.
Broca’s discoveries were also an important, driving force behind the more general effort to relate complex behavior to particular parts of the cerebral cortex, which, significantly, produced the first brain maps. Incorrect paths such as phrenology notwithstanding, during the heyday of Broca’s work, research aimed at identifying the cerebral localization of cognitive function was flourishing and the study of aphasic syndromes was the flagship of neuropsychology. During these early years, the investigation into brain and behavior was based almost solely upon lesion studies. Although researchers were able to analyze lesions at the level of brain macroscopy and functional deficit, this is, unfortunately, where their analyses ended. On an anatomical level, researchers were not aware of the underlying principles of cellular dysfunction and disconnectivity, and of the huge amount of variability among different subjects. On a behavioral level, their distinctions were crude because they were not aware of the structural properties of language and cross-linguistic variation.
Although much has been discovered since Broca claimed that the region contains “the faculty of articulated language,” even today, these problems have not been completely solved. Technological advancements have made more detailed studies possible, but there is still no general agreement among anatomists on what constitutes the underlying microstructure of Broca’s region or even on the name of the region itself.
In the early twentieth century, anatomists distinguished a strict sense of Broca’s region from the more general sense of it. Just to make matters perfectly confusing, later researchers also referred to this particular piece of neural tissue as Broca’s area and Broca’s complex. The term “Broca’s area” seems to be misleading because it suggests that it is a single entity, characterized by a certain homogeneity in structure, connectivity, and function (almost as if it were a Brodmann area), whereas it has become increasingly clear that it actually includes cortical areas with different functional specializations and connectivity.
In an analogous situation, there is also no general agreement on how the cognitive functions related to Broca’s region should be characterized. It is, however, quite clear that modality-based divisions of the type found in standard neurology texts—speaking, understanding, repeating, naming, and so on—are not good enough units of measure and that creating divisions based on either psychological mechanisms or linguistically motivated concepts also fails to tell the whole story.
If it is so difficult to come to an understanding of each of these things alone, then how can we so easily easily claim that the anatomy and functional role of this part of the brain are related to each other? Initially established as the exclusive domain of clinical neurologists, the study of brain/language relations increasingly required deeper expertise in specialized domains. The field was transformed when psychologists entered with experimental methods and linguists entered with analytic categories and theoretical conceptions.
Later, when new methods has been developed, neuroscientists, biomedical engineers, and computer scientists became interested. Today, particularly as a result of important advances made in neuroimaging during the past two decades, Broca’s region and, for that matter, all language areas are being investigated from every angle from which we can manage to approach them.
The careers of the editors of this volume illustrate the phenomenon: Our long-term research program has always focused on Broca’s region, and we currently use fMRI as a method of investigation. However, while one of us studies the structure of this region primarily by looking at cells, cellular architecture, cortical layers, and borders, the other editor is primarily concerned with words, phrases, sentences, and grammatical rules and the way in which they are instantiated in neural tissue.
Indeed, as the volume of research into the relations between brain and language has created several communities, each importing its own concepts, methods, and considerations, we thought that it was time to stop and reflect together, and that is the purpose of this book. In it, we tried to do what is generally considered to be nearly impossible: to mix intellectual traditions and cultures and to juxtapose rather disparate bodies of knowledge, styles of reasoning, and forms of argumentation. At the same time, we made every effort to produce a book that is both relevant and accessible to a broad audience.
To this end, we invited scientists with diverse backgrounds to contribute their particular take at the Broca’s Region Workshop, hoping that a coherent and perhaps even a novel picture would emerge. Although the participants share a special interest in Broca’s region, their backgrounds and approaches— neuroanatomy, physiology, evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, clinical neurology, functional imaging, speech and language research, computational biology, and psychological, neurological, and theoretical linguistics—represent all the myriad angles from which we currently approach Broca’s region.
We met at the Forschungszentrum in Juelich, Germany, on June 4 through 6, 2004. As one would expect, the meeting was unusual. At times it became tense, but it was never dull. We are happy to report that it reflected a genuine effort on everyone’s part to listen, accommodate, and, most of all, understand.
We offer the readers of this volume the product of our Broca’s Region Workshop—contributions made by the participants and their research teams, amended after they were presented to the workshop’s diverse audience. To underscore the richness of viewpoints contained herein and to give readers an idea of the level of interaction that took place, we have included parts of the discussion that we recorded during the workshop. Because Broca’s region is such an historically significant concept and rich area, we added a collection of classic and recent-yet-classic papers. Along with cutting-edge science, we wish to remind readers of the celebrated past from which much may be learned. These historical chapters include the first two papers written by Paul Broca, as well as some work by two of the most important neurologists of the nineteenth century, Carl Wernicke and John Hughlings-Jackson. We also included parts of twentieth-century papers by Korbinian Brodmann, Norman Geschwind, Harold Goodglass, Roman Jakobson, Jay Mohr, and Arnold Pick.
The resulting volume, we believe, reflects the state of the art. We hope that it will stimulate more interdisciplinary work, as the project called “Broca’s region,” which encompasses the study of brain/language relations, is far from being finished.
We are grateful to the speakers/contributors, who helped bring the workshop and book to life. We were supported by Oxford University Press, with Catharine Carlin at the wheel; by the Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH, the chairman of its board of directors, Joachim Treusch, and the director of its Institute of Medicine, Karl Zilles; and by the Centre for Research on Language, Brain, and Mind at McGill University, and its director, Shari Baum. We would also like to thank Katie Clark and Andrea Santi for their help. Without these individuals and organizations, neither the workshop nor the book would ever have happened. Their help and generosity were invaluable in creating and carrying out this project. - Preface -
Book Details
- Hardcover: 440 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
- ISBN-10: 0195177649
- ASIN: B001PGXLXG
- Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.3 x 1.2 inches