Wernicke Center
The Wernicke center , Wernicke area or Wernicke region denotes an area in the brain that forms the sensory language center and, together with the Broca area, is regarded as one of the two main components of the language center . It was named after the German neurologist Carl Wernicke (1848–1905), who first described it in 1874.
Anatomical location
According to Korbinian Brodmann's division , the Wernicke Center is located in the rear part of Area 22.
The Wernicke area occurs only in the dominant cerebral hemisphere (that is, in the hemisphere in which language is processed both motor and sensory), which is usually located on the left in right-handers, but is optionally on the left or right in left-handers can.
function
While auditory impulses are primarily rationally integrated in the Wernicke Center and decisive processes for speech understanding take place there, the non-rational components of what is heard are processed in the corresponding area on the opposite half of the brain, whereby, for example, the understanding of music and those associated with music (above all emotionally tinged) associations have their origin there.
Afferents
The Wernicke Center receives feed lines primarily from the primarily auditory cortex .
Efferents
The Wernicke Center projects into numerous cortical association fields in which what is heard is processed further. Particularly noteworthy are the connections between the Wernicke language center and the motor language center, which are established by the fibrae arcuatae cerebri . Since language formation is inextricably linked with language understanding, the motor language center can only fulfill its task in close cooperation with the Wernicke area.
damage
The complete or partial failure of the sensory language center (i.e. the Wernicke region) leads to sensory aphasia . Symptoms here are disorders of speech comprehension that correlate with the degree of damage. In contrast to motor aphasia , those affected can often imitate speech sounds to a limited extent, but they are not able to understand what is being said and therefore produce “gibberish” that neither the listener nor themselves can understand.
Furthermore, people suffering from failures in the Wernicke area are no longer able to assign any auditory emissions to their sources. For example, they hear a helicopter flying overhead, but do not understand that the rattle is attributable to its rotors.
Since not only the written and oral communication is indispensably linked to the Wernicke Center, but also the majority of our thinking makes use of the linguistic tools, pathologies of the sensory language center usually also have profound impairments of the personality of the patient, among which these often result suffer hard.
swell
- Martin Trepel: Neuroanatomie - Structure and Function , Urban & Fischer , 3rd edition 2004, Munich / Jena ( ISBN 3-437-41297-3 )
