Brain Geography: Map Details Newly Identified Regions of the Mind

Up to this point, mapping the brain has largely been a slow process. It started in the 1860s, when Pierre Paul Broca, MD, correlated speech control with a specific area of the cerebral cortex (the brain’s outer layer), a region now described as Broca’s area. Later in the 19th century, several other distinct regions of the cortex were identified, and in 1907, neurologist Korbinian Brodmann published hand-drawn diagrams and descriptions of 52 brain regions. Since that time, however, additions to the knowledge base about the brain’s geography had been modest–until this July.