Sagan and Broca

I don’t know where Carl Sagan’s brain is stored, if it had been stored at all. If it were in a museum, I think it should be beside French scientist Pierre Paul Broca’s brain in the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris. Carl Sagan held Broca’s brain and mused about it and published a book in 1974 entitled Broca’s Brain. In his book, Sagan spoke of the genius of a brilliant brain anatomist and anthropologist who died in 1880 perhaps of an aneurism while he was at work on some masterpiece mapping out parts of the human brain.

Carl Sagan, in his book, held Paul Broca’s brain as it marinated in formalin and could not help but wonder if all that genius that Broca possessed was still there. Broca was indeed a revolutionary thinker. In a time when the Church and State prohibited the study of man through scientific methods, Broca took pains to convene the first meeting of the Society of Anthropology of Paris in 1859, the same year that Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. But he was known for having discovered parts of the brain involved in processing emotions — the limbic region and most famous for discovering, in 1865, what eventually became known as Broca’s area — that small region in the third convolution in the left frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. If that is too technical an address for you, you could just remember that this is the area responsible for speech — the spoken word.

Fast forward to a study published just last Oct. 16 in the journal Science by Ned Sahin of Harvard and his other colleagues. These doctors have confirmed that indeed Broca’s area is where the processing of the spoken word occurs. In fact, they even timed it — it takes a sixth of a second for a person to think of a word, apply grammatical rules to it and send it to our lips to utter. They found this out by performing the experiment in an already open epileptic brain that is being treated for seizures. They attached electrodes to the sections of Broca’s area and made the patients think of a word then utter it. The spikes that resulted corresponded with the time that the word was thought of, grammatically harmonized, and then uttered. It confirmed that the processing of the spoken word happens in sequence and not in parallel.

I am not sure how much time experts on the spoken word — media personalities, debaters, litigators, poets, homily-giving priests — ever give to contemplating Broca’s area. Imagine all the meanings attached to the spoken word, released like powerful artillery to the receptive, all come from a small nook in the third crease of your higher brain. That nook better be a good place because it sends a lot of noise to a waiting world.

Sagan, spent his life as the quintessential science writer and popularizer. That, I think is one of the best tributes anyone can make to Broca’s contribution. In the unforgettable science shows that he made, Sagan’s own Broca’s area was in its most eloquent in inspiring non-scientists to understand nature, saying that to be scientifically literate is our best bet to avoid abuses. So maybe I do not need to know if Sagan’s brain has been stored somewhere. I hear his voice in the works he has recorded for me, and those interested, to watch over and over again. I heard because his own Broca spoke.

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