The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [15]
The discovery of Broca’s area became more significant several years later when Carl Wernicke published his observations about another brain area in the temporal lobe of the brain now called Wernicke’s area. Damage to this area resulted in a completely different set of symptoms. Specifically, Wernicke damage often results in people’s inability to use nouns and regular verbs while, at the same time, they freely use function words. A Wernicke patient who is asked to describe the same picture might say something like, “Well, right here is one of them and I think she’s next to that one. So if I see over there you’ll see her too. Let’s see. I’m thinking of her now. She’s over there.”
To say that Broca’s area controls style words and Wernicke’s controls content words is a gross oversimplification. Nevertheless, it points to the fact that the distinction between content and style words is occurring at a fairly basic level in the brain.
Particularly noteworthy is that Broca’s area—the region linked to function words—is in the frontal lobe of the brain. The frontal lobe controls a number of skills, many of them social. For example, dozens of studies have demonstrated how frontal areas are linked to abilities to express and conceal emotions. Other frontal areas are associated with the ability to read other people’s facial expressions. A number of promising studies now suggest that many of our abilities to control our emotions and to establish social relations with others are related to frontal lobe activity.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of frontal lobe damage and changes in social behavior and personality was the case of Phineas Gage. Gage was an explosives expert for a railroad in the mid-1800s. By all accounts, he was a careful, conscientious, and serious individual. One summer day, he was tamping down some blasting powder in preparation for an explosion to clear some rocks. He accidentally created a spark with his long tamping rod that ignited the powder, causing the rod to shoot upward, where it neatly tore a hole through his skull and destroyed much of his frontal lobe. To everyone’s amazement, Gage wasn’t killed and he returned to good health within a few weeks. That is, except for the hole in the front of his head. Over the next months, Phineas Gage’s personality changed dramatically. He went from reserved to loud, from conscientious to impulsive, from respectful to obscene, and from sober to, well, not sober. He was a completely different person and never returned to his old personality.
In the early 1900s, Ivan Pavlov noted the same thing in his research with dogs. Pavlov, who won one of the first Nobel Prizes, is best remembered for his experiments where a dog could be trained to salivate when a bell rang. In a failed attempt to find the location of classical conditioning in the brain, Pavlov surgically disrupted different parts of dogs’ brains. He reported that only damage to the frontal lobe affected the animal’s personality. Although the dogs with frontal lobe injury still remembered things from before the surgery, they were simply different dogs.
If the frontal lobe is closely linked to personality and social behaviors, it is not surprising that any language areas in the frontal lobe—such as Broca’s area—would also be related to personality and social behaviors.
FUNCTION WORDS ARE VERY VERY SOCIAL
Brain research points to the inescapable conclusion that function words are related to our social worlds. In fact, stealth words by their very nature are social.
Imagine you are walking down the street on a windy afternoon and a piece of paper lands on the ground in front of you. There is a handwritten note on the paper that says:
The note is grammatically correct and is understandable