Interesting Facts About Brain

Transient ischemic attacks (TIAs) are mini-strokes that can cause sudden dimming or loss of vision (including amaurosis fugax), speech impairment ranging from slurring to dysarthria or aphasia, and mental confusion. But unlike a stroke, the symptoms of a TIA can resolve within a few minutes or 24 hours. Brain injury may still occur in a TIA lasting only a few minutes. A silent stroke or silent cerebral infarct (SCI) differs from a TIA in that there are no immediately observable symptoms. An SCI may still cause long lasting neurological dysfunction affecting such areas as mood, personality, and cognition. An SCI often occurs before or after a TIA or major stroke.
Language
The study of how language is represented and processed by the brain is neurolinguistics. This field originated from the 19th-century discovery that damage to different parts of the brain appeared to cause different symptoms: physicians noticed that individuals with damage to a brain region now known as Broca's area had difficulty in producing language, whereas those with damage to a region now known as Wernicke's area had difficulty in understanding it. Since then, there has been substantial debate over what processes these and other parts of the brain subserve, and over whether or not there even is a strong one-to-one relationship between brain regions and language functions.