Brain Lateralization

At first, I was going to write about split-brain patients and the constant struggle they face with having one hand completely independent from the other. I was looking for information on the split-brain topic when I found out about Wernicke's Aphasia. This fascinated me so much. Wernicke's Aphasia, which is also known as fluent aphasia, is an impairment in language ability traditionally associated with neurological damage to Wernicke's area in the brain. Wernicke’s area is responsible for comprehension of speech. Speech retains a fluid sounding rhythm, while speech comprehension is greatly affected. Basically, what this means is that patients with this aphasia keep their fluidity of speech, being able to keep talking with no stops, but the words they say are jumbled, kind of like a word-salad, where all the words are mixed together and there's no way of distinguishing them from each other. Reading and writing are also affected with this impairment. These patients have no idea that they are jumbling their speech, which fascinates me as well, and they think they are just talking like any other normal person. I guess it just really fascinates me how you can think you're speaking normally but not really be saying anything at all.

I found lots of videos on Wernicke's Aphasia, each more interesting than the last, but I chose only one to show. I think the reason I chose this video was because this patient is so young and she suffered a stroke at such a young age.