Localisation of function

• Broca’s area was identified in the mid 19th century through post mortem autopsies
• Patients who had speech difficulties had damage in the frontal lobe
• Damage to Broca’s area results in Broca’s aphasia / expressive aphasia
• Symptoms of Broca’s Aphasia?

  Slow speech, lack of fluency, inability to find the right words
• Damage to Wernicke’s area results in Wernicke’s aphasia / receptive aphasia
• Patients will struggle to understand content of speech
• Phineas gage had an iron bar shot through his left frontal lobe
• Gage was calm and polite before the accident and become violent and rude afterwards
• fMRI can demonstrate correlations between different mental activites and different areas of the brain
• Gage’s doctor believed the

  left frontal lobe was responsible for self control
• Ovaysikia et al (2011) increase blood flow in different areas of the brain will depend on whether the person is reading words or recognising facial expressions
• Higher cognitive processes such as learning and memory are too complex to be localised to a single area
• Lashley (1950) Removed different parts of rat brains whilst they were learning a maze but no area was significantly important
• Higher cognitive processes are distributed within the brain
• The brain can recover functions after damage to areas associated with that function
• methodological concerns as there is a sample size of just one