symbolic 51: aphasia
I've been reading up on aphasia, the mental condition wherein your language centers are fucked. Usually brought on by a stroke or some sort of physical trauma to the head (specifically the left hemisphere), aphasia is a breakdown of the signal between the processing sections of the brain. Those suffering from Global Aphasia are good and truly separated from language. You cannot produce recognizable words and you have no ability to comprehend written or verbal language. On the short end of this stick is Anomic Aphasia where you’ve just got this persistent inability to find the right word to describe what you are thinking.
In between is the land of Broca and Wernicke. Paul Pierre Broca (1824-1880) discovered that if you remove a small area about four square centimeters in size, you can destroy a person’s ability to speak. Maps of the brain label this little square “Broca’s Area” and also lent his name to this manifestation of motor aphasia. Broca tumbled to this area during research with a test patient named “Tan” because, while Tan’s ability to recognize speech was intact, the only sounds he could produce in response to any stimuli were “tan-tan.”
Carl Wernicke (1848-1905) was a German neurologist who had some influence on Freud and whose monograph on aphasia came several years after Broca’s discovery of motor aphasia. The syndrome described by Wernicke is now known as sensory aphasia and is marked by an inability to understand speech. Additionally (or rather, in more extreme cases), this inability also extends to the patient’s ability to speak as their discourse descends into incomprehensible gibberish.
Wernicke also discovered that different areas of the brain were affected in the case of either syndrome. Now, I’m not about to pull out a map of the brain and draw little ‘x’s where things go bad, but the interesting thing to note here is the movement of thought and speech through the brain. Broca’s area is in the frontal lobes just above the lateral fissure, just in front of the cortex. Signals from this area go directly to the motor sections of the brain so as to move the muscles of the jaw and throat in speech. Whereas Wernicke’s area lies further back in the brain (in the left temporal lobe beneath the lateral fissure) and is adjacent to the primary auditory cortex, which is the terminal point of auditory input into the brain.
You whack these areas hard enough or damage the connective tissue between the language areas and you get all sorts of disconnection syndromes. There are a number of fun names for them, but my favorite is “pure-word blindness.” Patients with pure-word blindness can function normally; they just have no comprehension of the written word.
Think about that one. It’s not just being illiterate. There you can at least realize that what you are seeing is some sort of language. No, this is a state where you can’t even understand that you are looking at language. It’s not just weird symbols on the wall which you can’t fathom. You don’t even realize that the impressions on the wall are symbols.
Now, let’s look at the other extreme. Could you be “hyper-word sensitive”? This question skates into a larger question of what is language and how much of it is learned and how much of it is something that is, well, genetically ingrained. Because, when you get right down to it, what happens to you when either Wernicke’s or Broca’s area gets whacked? You don’t forget “language,” rather your ability to make the connections between what you hear and what you mean to say and the language warehouse in your brain are severed. What would it mean to have the language centers of your brain be hyper-aware?
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
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