Know Broca's lesion method in mapping brain activity in humans and how studies of brain disorders to the Broca area help evolve the scientific understanding of cognition

In 1861, a patient arrived at a Paris hospital, saying the syllable "tan" over and over again. His doctor, Paul Broca, found that the man could understand language without a problem. He just couldn't say anything besides "tan."

When the patient unexpectedly died a few days later, Broca dissected his brain and found a small bit of damage, called a lesion, on the left frontal lobe, leading him to conclude that this part of the brain must be responsible for speech generation. Back then, scientists had only recently accepted the idea that we think with our brains rather than our hearts. And some kind of mean experiments with animals had convinced them that different parts of the brain were dedicated to different mental jobs.

Broca's lesion method seemed like the way to draw up a localized map of brain activity in humans. Doctors found patients with specific cognitive deficits and then matched those deficits up with the damaged parts of their brains. From these patients, they deduced that new memories are formed in the hippocampus, fear comes from the amygdala, and that we recognize faces using the fusiform face area.

However, there is a big difference between correlating a certain part of the brain with a certain mental task and proving that that part of the brain actually does that task. And sure enough, when we developed the FMRI machine in the 1990s to track moment-to-moment changes in brain activity, the old localized map of the brain quickly began to unravel. For one thing, huge swaths of the brain seemed to activate every time the brain does anything at all, suggesting that even the most basic mental tasks require a coordinated effort.

And it turns out that this coordination relies on a network of long-range communication fibers. In fact, damage to these fibers explains why some people with intact Broca's areas couldn't speak. And the communications network also explains why some people with broken Broca's areas could speak because the fibers proved able to rewire Broca's tasks to other parts of the brain.

But again, just because a certain part of the brain lights up during a certain mental task doesn't necessarily mean that part of the brain is doing something critical to that task. In other words, the MRI method of brain imaging turned out to have the same problem as the lesion method. Fortunately, we can get around this problem by putting the two methods together.

Recently, researchers performed scans on 182 people with brain lesions, mostly soldiers with shrapnel wounds, and had them perform a battery of mental tasks. Then they put all the scans together to see which brain parts were always active when the subjects could perform a task and which parts were always turned off when they could not. As a result, we now have a map of the brain that shows which parts work together to help us do brainy things, like understand language, solve puzzles, and remember stuff. But even with these maps, our own brains still give us a lot to ponder. We may never know, for example, why Broca's patient could only say "tan," or whether there was something else he was trying to tell us.