Just below the place where we remember words, and a little forward of it, lies the place where we remember other sounds which are not words, such as the noises of bells and whistles, barking of dogs, mewing of cats, all buzzings and creakings and gratings and crashings, all laughing and crying. Every kind of sound which isn’t either words or music is recognized and remembered here. Beyond this spot, still farther forward and down, and just above the rear end of the cheek-bone, is the place where we remember music. If we don’t know anything about music, and can’t tell Yankee Doodle from Old Hundred, then we don’t use this part of our brains at all. But if we do know one tune from another, and know a good many to recognize them when we hear them, here is where we do the knowing.

[ A right-handed person has all his thinking spots on the left side of his brain. ]

Back of the word-seeing part of the thinking spot, and reaching pretty well round to the back of the head, lies the place where we remember everything we see, except words written or in print. Above the word-speaking part of the brain, or speech center, from which we control the mouth, throat, lips, and tongue, which we use in speaking, lie the various points from which we manage other parts of the body. As you might expect, next the speech center lies the center for the rest of the face and for the head and eyes. Above that comes the center for the hand and arm. Still higher up, right on the top of the head, comes the center for the legs. So whenever we do anything with any part of the body, we have to signal the proper muscles from the part of the brain that lies between the tip of the ear and the top of the head. Close behind this region is the spot where we feel everything that touches the skin; so that we can make the movement and feel the results most handily.

So as you see, the surface of the brain is a sort of map or chart of the entire body. Every muscle, every point on the skin, the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, every several organ which we possess, has its own special spot on the surface of the brain, somewhere above or behind the ear. Each half of the body is charted on one side of the brain, a spot in one for each spot in the other. But we who have to use these brains to think and remember with, as well as to see and hear and feel with, and to control our muscles, have chosen to do this thinking and remembering with the spot on the left side of the head which corresponds to the muscles of the lips and mouth and tongue, and to the eyes and ears and the right hand. Thus we have everything convenient, all in one small spot on one side of our heads, where we can get at everything with the least trouble. But what the front part of the brain is for, is something that nobody knows much about.

Certain very strange results follow from this practice of ours of using only one side of the brain to think, remember, and speak with; and using different parts of that for thinking and remembering about different sorts of things. Once upon a time there was a workman who was hit hard enough to break his skull, on the left side of his head, pretty well round toward the back, and just over the spot where, as I have explained, are stored up all the memories of things seen. He seemed not seriously hurt; but when his wife came to see him at the hospital, he did not know her. Neither did he know his children nor his friends. In fact, he didn’t even know that they were human beings. He had absolutely lost the memory of everything that he had ever seen.

But the minute his wife spoke he knew her at once. Or if he could feel of any familiar thing he knew what it was. All the while, he could see perfectly well. His eyesight remained as good as ever, he simply couldn’t remember that he had ever seen things before. The plain seeing, he could do with either side of his head; and the left side being hurt, he did it with the other. But the remembering that he had seen the same thing before, he did with the left side only; and when he could no more do it with that, he could not do it at all. Yet his memory for sounds and the feeling of things was just as good as ever; because the places where he did these sorts of remembering were not under the place where he got hit. And the moment the doctors lifted out the splinter of bone that was pressing on his seeing-things spot, then he remembered wife, children, friends, everything as before.

Here is another case, much like the first, and yet curiously different: An educated woman, somewhat well along in years, went to bed at night in ordinary health. During the night, however, a small blood-vessel burst and formed a tiny blood blister on the left side of her brain, about an inch in front of the spot where, as I have been telling, the workman was hit who couldn’t remember his wife when he saw her. She had, in short, a sort of internal black eye, just on the spot that she had been using for sixty years and more to remember written and printed words.

She woke up in the morning, therefore, totally unable to read a single word. She could see as well as ever, understand perfectly every word said to her, speak and write without the least difficulty—but she simply could not read. Give her a printed book, she could count the letters in every word, draw them on paper, tell which were tall, short, round, or square, see them in fact just as well as before—but she no longer knew what they meant. It was exactly as if she had never learned to read at all; and being much too old to learn again, she never read another word as long as she lived.

There is another accident which is so little uncommon that probably every one who reads this book will some time in his life see an example of it. This is a case where a blood vessel bursts on the left side of the brain and wrecks the speech center. The person to whom this happens, immediately forgets how to talk. If the blood clot is small, so it presses upon the speech center and nothing else, the victim of this sort of accident can read and write as before, and understand all that is said to him. Oddly enough, too, he can make any sound that he ever could, and repeat parrot-like any words that he hears. But he cannot remember the meaning of words. He is precisely like a man suddenly transported to a foreign country where they speak a language which he never heard. His own language has become to him like Chinese.