Neuroscience Bite: Wernicke's Area

Wernicke's Area is located in the superior temporal cortex near the temporal - parietal junction. Wernicke's Area was originally discovered by Dr. Carl Wernicke who observed that people with damage to Wernicke's Area had trouble producing speech that was intelligible and also had trouble with speech comprehension. Based on that observation, Dr. Wernicke proposed that this region was responsible for speech comprehension - translating the audio code sent from the primary auditory cortex into language. It turns out this is not true entirely - more on this next week!