Idiot Brain: What Your Head Is Really Up To

by Dean Burnett

Many neuroscientists argue that the retina is part of the brain, as it develops from the same tissue and is directly linked to it.

This described arrangement would be more like looking through the wrong end of a telescope made of Vaseline.

you will notice that they don’t move in one smooth sweep but a series of short jerks (do it slowly to appreciate this properly).

We have parts of the brain that are dedicated to recognizing faces,

dichotic-listening task. The stream in the other ear, not the focus of attention, featured the shock-provoking words. Subjects still showed a measurable fear reaction when the words were heard, revealing that the brain was clearly paying attention to the “other” stream. But it doesn’t reach the level of conscious processing,

Broca’s area, named for Pierre Paul Broca, at the rear of the frontal lobe, was believed to be integral to speech formation. Thinking of something to say and putting the relevant words in the correct order, that was Broca’s area at work. The other region was Wernicke’s area, identified by Carl Wernicke, in the temporal lobe region. This was credited with language comprehension. When we understand words, their meanings and numerous interpretations, this was the doing of Wernicke’s area.

Broca’s aphasia, aka expressive aphasia, means someone cannot “produce” language. There’s nothing wrong with their mouth or tongue, they can still understand speech, they just can’t produce any fluid, coherent communication of their own.

Wernicke’s aphasia is essentially the opposite problem. Those afflicted don’t seem able to comprehend language. They can apparently recognize tone, inflection, timing and so on but the words themselves are meaningless. And they respond similarly, with long, complex-sounding sentences, but instead of “I went to the store, bought some bread,” it’s “I wendle to the do the store tore todayhayhay boughtage soughtage some read bread breed”; a combination of real and made-up words strung together with no recognizable linguistic meaning, because the brain is damaged in such a way that it cannot recognize language, so also can’t produce it.