Localisation

• Localisation-

  • There was a holistic theory that the whole brain controls the whole of the bodies functions
  • Disproved by Wernick and Broca since they found localised functions, where different parts of the brain were responsible for different things in the body
  • The cerebrum is divided into 2 equal half’s and they’re responsible for different things, called lateralisation.
  • Left is controlled by the right brain, right side by the left brain.
• Localisation-

  Motor, somatosensory, visual and auditory centres-

  • Cerebral cortex is the outer layer of both hemispheres
  • Motor = back of the frontal lobe controlling voluntary movements
  • Back of the frontal lobe is controlling the somatosensory area, where sensory information from the skin is sent, with half the area just for the face and hands touch senses.
  • At the back of the brain in the occipital lobe is the visual area, which gets information from both eyes (opposite eye to opposite part of the brain).
  • Temporal lobe has the auditory information, analysing speech.
• Localisation-

  Language centres-

  • Only in the left side of the brain’s front, called Broca’s area.
  • Damage to Broca’s area caused Broca’s aphasia, where the speech is slow and lacks fluency, having problems with conjunctions and prepositions
  • Wernickes area was in the left temporal region, and when damaged people could produce language but not understand it, Wernickes aphasia caused people to speak nonsense as a part of their speech.
• Localisation-

  S- Damage has been linked to mental disorders, neurosurgery is an option to help- Dougherty (2002) had 44 people with OCD have a cingulototmy, and 30% had success, 14% partially.

  W- Language isn’t localised to Broca/Wernicks areas- Dick + Tremblay (2016) fMRI’s study neural processes, to see that language is distributed more holistically in the cortex and right side, subcortical and thalamus.

  W- Case studies don’t produce meaningful generalisable findings due to each being individual to each specific case study.
• Localisation-

  CPS- Brain scans support- Peterson (1988) used them to show Wernickes area was active during a listening task. – Buckner + Peterson (1996) revealed long-term memory showed that semantic and episodic memories were in various parts of the prefrontal cortex.

  CPW- Lashley (1950) removed areas of the cortex (10-50%) in rats, proved no problem learning a route of a maze, proving that learning needs all parts of the brain, not just particular ones, more holistic.