Just look at this brain! In case you're not up to date on all the science, there's a whole

lot going on here. There are neurons and glial cells, capillaries and myelinated axons, all

this anatomy. But the sexiest stuff to focus on has been the nerve cells in your cerebral

cortex. That's this outside layer here - the inside looks whitish, this stuff looks grey,

hence the terms "white matter" and "grey matter".

The first real evidence of the brain's role in language came not from observing "normal"

brains using language, but from damaged brains. This started back in the 1800's, when pioneering

researchers dissected the brains of aphasiacs. The Ancient Greek word ἀφασία simply

means 'speechlessness'. Patients suffering from aphasia have head injuries that disrupt

their abilities to understand or to produce speech. It turns out that specific linguistic

difficulties were associated with lesions in specific parts of the cortex.

The logic involved in pinning down these language centers of the brain is pretty simple: if

someone doing action A has a healthy region B, but someone else who has damage to region

B can't do A, then it looks like region B is necessary for action A.

In 1861, the French surgeon, ahem... Paul Broca, began to study the brains of aphasiacs

and hunted down just such a region apparently crucial for speech production, a region we

today call Broca's area. Inspired by Broca's findings, a German doctor and anatomist named

Carl Wernicke went and found another region, this one linked to linguistic understanding.

As you might have guessed, that region is called Wernicke's area.

A little sidenote for you anatomy buffs or anyone looking for extra credit. Today's most

widely used system for cutting the brain into regions was proposed by another German anatomist,

Korbinian Brodmann. This outer surface of the brain we've been admiring has over two

dozen of these Brodmann areas. Broca's corresponds to Brodmann areas 45 and 44, while 22 is home

to Wernicke's area. Both of these regions are most likely in your left hemisphere.

With all the technological leaps forward we've made in brain imaging since Broca's day, looking

inside the brain to see what's lighting up where has obviously become even more important.

But don't let the aphasiacs mislead you. What we're searching for inside the brain isn't

necessarily straightforward. The way researchers speak about it, it's not as if neuroimaging

gives us the exact brain location of language or of love or any other human concept. Instead,

we get to see the areas of the brain - the activation of the actual brain cells - that

are involved in performing a task.

These days, there are two fields that tackle our topic of the day (which is "language and

the brain" in case you've forgotten). The first one, neurolinguistics, makes an entire

discipline out of the kind of research we've been chatting about. Psycholinguistics, a

related field, takes on general questions like "how do humans acquire language?" and

"how do humans speak & understand?", with a focus on the role of the mind in these activities.

The two fields inform each other, meaning that there is a high degree of interdisciplinarity

here.

With all this stuff about the brain going through... your brain... think for a minute

about two 20th-century models of language. In model #1, human language is a collection

of behaviors that are conditioned by external stimuli. Verbal behavior - language - that

gets a favorable response will be reinforced and repeated. This is a perspective called

Behaviorism, and it places the brain in a background role.

Model #2 is a very popular linguistic model of language, a model that dominated linguistics

during the second half of the twentieth century. Known as Nativism, it holds that language

is an innate mental faculty. Grammar isn't just a linguistic concept anymore, it's actually

born into every healthy human brain.

But instead of marginalizing the brain by focusing on external behavior and operant

conditioning, and instead of bringing linguistics to the brain by mapping grammatical concepts

to brain areas, perhaps we could be a little more considerate of what the brain is actually

doing when we articulate our understanding of language.

Yes, being that specific with our familiar, general, academic terms will require a bit

more intellectual muscle than ignoring the brain or slapping stickers like "language",

"grammar", "speech" onto some part of your cortex. But consider it an invitation to get

to know your brain, and your brain on language, a bit better.