Brain damage and the effects of brain damage are highly unpredictable, and one of the common results is the disruption of the victim's ability to use language. Disordered language resulting from brain damage has usually been called aphasia. Though since this term means literally "absence of speech", and since few if any lose their linguistic ability entirely, many neurologists now prefer the term dysphasia which mean "disordered speech". However for the purpose of this essay , it will be referred to as aphasia.

In the first half of the nineteenth century several researchers independently noticed that a number of brain-damaged patients had strikingly similar diso

Grice gives the example of Dr P., a skilled musician and music teacher who suffered a mild stroke in his right hemisphere. In most respects the stroke had no visible effects. Dr.P. remained highly intelligent and cultured, spoke fluently, and elegantly, both sang and played, and continued teaching. Yet Dr P. could no longer assemble visual data. When trying to identify a rose, he pondered in perplexity. and used his "healthy left-hemisphere analytical" abilities to describe it. Dr P. had not lost the word rose, nor the concept of a rose, "but the ability to put together a mass of red and green visual impressions into a coherent whole and assign the result to the category of roses."(p.153) Therefore his damaged right hemisphere could do nothing with his visual processing that was defective, and as soon as non-visual information became available( smell), his right hemisphere functioned perfectly.

More interestingly, are the effects of damage from the right side of the brain.

While it is important to mention that the standard model is a fundamental one, in helping us further understand the brain, there is still a great many unknowns. According to Grice, although Wernicke's area plays a crucial role in accessing vocabulary, words are not stored in Wernicke's area. However, a number of fascinating cases suggest certain methodological lessons, that can be drawn from these aphasias and others. Most aphasics exhibit some degree of anomia, the inability to find words for things, and some who have fairly normal speech can find no words. (p.155) Yet certain patients have been found to have specific versions of anomia unaccompanied by any other symptoms.

The study of aphasic patients , brings neurologists to further analysis of the cerebrum of the human brain. It is here, where most of our higher cognitive faculties appear to be located, and is divided into two symmetric halves called hemispheres; these hemispheres are connected only by a small bundle of hard tissue known as the corpus callosum.(p.151) Later discoveries have found that each hemisphere is responsible for one half of the body. It is the left hemisphere of the brain that controls the right side of the body and vice versa. Thus, damage to the left hemisphere can possibly produce blindness in the right eye, or even paralysis on the right side of the body.

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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)