Fundamental or forgotten? Is Pierre Paul Broca still relevant in modern neuroscience?

ABSTRACT

The ability to speak is a unique human capacity, but where is it located in our brains? This question is closely connected to the pioneering work of Pierre Paul Broca in the 1860s. Based on post-mortem observations of aphasic patients' brains, Broca located language production in the 3rd convolution of the left frontal lobe and thus reinitiated the localizationist view of brain functions. However, contemporary neuroscience has partially rejected this view in favor of a network-based perspective. This leads to the question, whether Broca's findings are still relevant today. In this mini-review, we discuss current and historical implications of Broca's work by focusing on his original contribution and contrasting it with contemporary knowledge. Borrowing from Broca's famous quote, our review shows that humans indeed “speak with the left hemisphere”– but Broca's area is not the sole “seat of articulatory language”.

KEYWORDS:

• Pierre Paul Broca
• aphasia
• Broca's area
• speech production
• functional neuroanatomy
• language lateralization

Acknowledgements

We thank the Jussieu Campus of the Sorbonne University in Paris for the opportunity to see the brains of Monsieur Leborgne and Monsieur Lelong. The authors are particularly grateful to Dr. Patrick Conan for his guidance through the medical collection. Furthermore, we would like to thank Ms. Muriel Kaysh for her help with the figures. This paper was supported by BMBF Grant 01DR17005 to S.O.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Patrick Friedrich http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5120-5880

Catrona Anderson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4703-633X

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by BMBF [grant number 01DR17005].