I’m just going to drift through the net here and pull some stuff up. It is very interesting to me that there are so many powerpoint presentations out there. We will have an assignment where I will ask you to find and present a powerpoint.
Auditory Cortex: The auditory cortex is ”The major cortical target of the neurons in the medial geniculate nucleus” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=.0POPlIEWmNCeTzBzCh5qiMtsI2nqLUmGxcvrfaQ7QG#2782). This image Dr. Ugurbil’s image of the auditory cortex shows the auditory cortex ‘light up’ when a word is heard. Compare the same brain area during reading.
Angular Gyrus: The angular gyrus ”plays a special role in inter-analyzer synthesis.” This UCSD news release Grasping Metaphor shows a nice picture of the angular gyrus ‘lighting up.’ A team led by V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, has found brain damage evidence for the role of the angular gyrus in interpreting metaphor. One subject, “prodded on “all that glitters is not gold,” … finally said that it meant you had to be very careful when buying jewelry because you might get robbed.”
The USCD team used the booba/kiki test.
Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area: A two-fer from Neuroscience for Kids. Scroll down to Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area and read that Broca’s area is for speech production and articulation and the Wernicke’s area is for (rather broadly) language comprehension. Broca’s area is associated with motor control of speech. Here’s Broca and a brain he studied, courtesy of Medical Science 532 of the U of Idaho. The site notes that Broca’s aphasia is also called expressive aphasia because people with damage to Broca’s area have difficulty producing spoken language. The National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders provides information about the types of aphasia. If Wernicke’s area is damaged, people “may speak in long sentences that have no meaning, add unnecessary words, and even create made-up words. For example, someone with Wernicke’s aphasia may say, ‘You know that smoodle pinkered and that I want to get him round and take care of him like you want before’” (quoted from the NIDCD site).
And then I ended up looking at homunculi:
motor homunculus From McGill’s The Brain.
