We’ve been talking about Broca’s Area for the last couple days now, but we really can ‘t talk about Broca without talking about his direct counterpart–Wernicke.

Wernicke’s Area is a great little patch of gray matter that you use all the time and don’t even realize it.  You ever have one of those times when you can’t think of the name of something?  That big monument down the street or that certain pizza place or that car you were looking at?  Well, when you finally catch on, that little voice in your head that always seems to whisper “The Civil War Cannonman” or “Joe’s Hot and Tasty Original Pizza” or “Buick Road Deathmaster”–that’s Wernicke.

Wernicke’s Area is your noun repository.  Names of people, places and things goes routing through Wernicke’s Area.  While it’s not as close to the prefrontal cortex–the thing you want to hit–as Broca, you CAN make a pathway from Wernicke to Broca and THEN to the prefrontal cortex.  In fact, there’s some evidence that says things stick around a little longer in Wernicke.

So next time you go planning an appeal to Broca, make sure you spare a thought for Wernicke, because keeping both of them together is going to put a serious boost to your writings’ memory retention.

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