Word: broca
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Site. These negative findings pinpointed the site of the damage: "the area of Broca"* (see diagram), which controls many components of the complex processes that result in speech. Like most of the brain lying near the surface, Broca's area gets its blood supply from one of the countless branches of the middle cerebral artery. The particular branch supplying Broca's area is not much thicker than the lead in a pencil, and if in Ike's case this was already narrowed by arteriosclerosis, a tiny clot would be enough to shut down the flow. That...
...total shutdown to Broca's area had lasted six minutes or more, Eisenhower would have lost the power of coherent speech; at normal blood heat, brain cells cannot survive longer than that without oxygen-bearing blood. Evidently the shutdown was incomplete or for a shorter period because, although the cells in Broca's area had been damaged, the damage was not severe: overnight the doctors observed improvement in the President's speech. Adequate blood flow to the oxygen-starved cells had been restored...
...named for Pierre Paul Broca, who described...