Let’s say that we are sitting in a coffee shop on Murphy Avenue in Sunnyvale and, while writing our understanding of Wernicke’s area, a sound wave enters our ear. This activates a group of neurons in the auditory cortex, and this activation activates the neurons in Wernicke’s area later. After this moment, we experience the feeling of “Iced americano?” Here, basically, Wernicke’s area’s responsibility is to map the neuronal patterns coming from the auditory cortex into the right words.

If the person has a hearing disability, the activation in the auditory cortex may not be as rich as the activations in a person who can hear very clearly. As a result of this, Wernicke’s area, which is activated upon the activation of the auditory cortex, might experience more difficulties mapping the incoming neural patterns into the right word, and this may require activation of some other brain regions to get the right word from other clues in the context.

And if the person is in a noisy restaurant with a group of friends, the ongoing situation of the inability to map the incoming sound patterns into the right words results in an overactive brain state that continuously tries to compress all the information coming from different parts of the brain (into the words that are meant by the speaker). This compression requires a lot of energy, and the constant process of failing to use a large amount of information that becomes available with the activation of various brain regions and compressing these information into a lower-dimensional state might be the root cause of the negative feelings these people experience during those moments. Even if the person does not have any hearing problems, if Wernicke’s area fails to map the sound patterns into the right word, similar problems may occur.