The Source of All Meaning

Elli Leadbeater reported on September 6, 2006 in the BBC News online article “Strange ducks shape brain science” (found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/5321054.stm) that researches have confidently found the brain region responsible for the storage of meaning.

After 150 years, the argument of which sector of the brain takes responsibility for the processing of meaning has been settled by researchers at the University of Manchester. They believe the temporal pole, the area just under the ears, is the area of brain tissue that stores meaning. Professor Matthew Lambon Ralph and his team have focused on the temporal pole as the culprit before, evidenced on scans of semantic dementia patients. Such patients who cannot clearly differentiate between the concepts of “bird” and “dog,” for example, have damaged or lost tissue from the temporal pole. However, concrete results were hard to find as these patients probably had other brain damage. Researches thus performed on people with damage-free brains ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation’ or ‘TMS,’ which uses magnetic field pulses to tire sections of the brain so it works improperly for a short period of time. In the normal patients, similar symptoms of the dementia patients were mildly displayed, understanding concepts at 10-percent slower rate. Lambon Ralph states that sufferers from abnormal temporal pole function hazily forget more and more details of word definitions or concepts over time.

Scientists researching abstract data as human reaction and brain psychology have the daunting task of finding true quantitative statistics for experiments that have the possibility for an infinite array of results. Perhaps this is why such as debate over the issue of where meaning is stored in the mind has been stretched out for 150 years. Originally, many scientists looked at the Wernicke’s area of the brain as the center for meaning computation. Though close to the temporal pole region, research has yet to be done on Wernicke’s area using TMS. Scientists studying within this field must be creative in their persistence in looking at alternate pathways to solutions or explanations, especially over centuries of focus on the same issue. Admirable as well is that the University of Manchester research team continues to put their findings to pragmatic use, working with speech therapists to help patients suffering from semantic dementia.

Advances in the field of mental illness, such as the confirmation of the temporal pole’s function, truly display the persistence of those wanting to find cures and answers. Personally, I know such a discovery can alter the emotions of any dementia patient’s family greatly. My grandfather slowly degenerated, in part, to dementia last year. I cannot help but wonder if such techniques as TMS could have been used to better diagnose or help treat his brain malfunctions. Families of patients in various stages of brain damage and diseases should be comforted to know that they can see progress being made in a field where immediate improvements are hard to witness. Long-term science should also be seen as beneficial in the long-run, as important strides can still be made, though the public might not see or be affected by such studies in their lifetime.