So everybody please meet Monsieur Tan:
(The below text is from a comment I wrote to Sander in my other blog)
"...aphasia is a neuropsychological disorder where the patient specifically loses the ability to speak (there are various forms, of course). The most famous example is "Monsieur Tan", a patient of a doctor called Paul Broca, back in 18-something. This patient could not say anything but the word 'tan' (with full intonation suggesting sentences with different words and meanings, but the output was just that: tan tan tan tan). Broca hypothesized that the disorder was due to the fact that a specific area of the brain was damaged. When opening up mr tan after his death, Broca indeed found that a special area ("Broca's area") was damaged.
Well, this discovery just about started the whole of cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology.
Broca's original article can be found here"
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1 comment:
Hey Jelle,
Now I remember. I didn't associate cognition with neuropsychological disorders. Oliver Sacks wrote a funny story about some patients with aphasia in the chapter "The President's Speech" from
"The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat"
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