One of the most frequently given reasons people provide for being unwilling to believe the claims of Happeh Theory, is that they go against established scientific claims or they are refuted by scientists.
That seems like a reasonable reaction since people are taught scientists are respected people who should be trusted, and “Happeh” is an unknown stranger on the internet.
Scientists are not infallible. They make mistakes as this series of blog entries will demonstrate. Every blog entry in this series provides an example of scientists being wrong about something.
Hopefully, after perusing these examples of scientists making mistakes, people will be more willing to believe the claims of Happeh Theory are correct, and that scientists are the ones who have made a mistake.
The news story this blog entry is based on reports that scientists have discovered that a brain function is taking place in a different area of the brain than they used to tell people the brain function took place in.
Area Of Brain Involved In Speech Processing Isn’t Where It Was Thought To Be
The part of the brain used for speech processing is in a different location than originally believed, according to a US study Monday that researchers said will require a rewrite of medical texts.
Wernicke’s area, named after the German neurologist who proposed it in the late 1800s, was long believed to be at the back of the brain’s cerebral cortex, behind the auditory cortex which receives sounds.
But a review by scientists at Georgetown University Medical Center of more than 100 imaging studies has shown it is actually three centimeters closer to the front of the brain, and is in front of the auditory cortex, not behind.
“Textbooks will now have to be rewritten,” said neuroscience professor Josef Rauschecker, lead author of the study which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We gave old theories that have long hung a knockout punch.”
Rauschecker and colleagues based their research on 115 previous peer-reviewed studies that investigated speech perception and used brain imaging scans — either MRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) or PET (positron emission tomography).
An analysis of the brain imaging coordinates in those studies pointed to the new location for Wernicke’s area, offering new insight for patients suffering from brain damage or stroke.
“If a patient can’t speak, or understand speech, we now have a good clue as to where damage has occurred,” said Rauschecker.
It also adds an intriguing wrinkle to the origins of language in humans and primates, who have also been shown to process audible speech in the same region of the brain.
“This finding suggests the architecture and processing between the two species is more similar than many people thought.”
Lead author Iain DeWitt, a PhD candidate in Georgetown’s Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, said the study confirms what others have found since brain imaging began in earnest in the 1990s, though some debate has persisted.
“The majority of imagers, however, were reluctant to overturn a century of prior understanding on account of what was then a relatively new methodology,” he said.
“The point of our paper is to force a reconciliation between the data and theory.”