October 25, 2006
a layman's cognitive science experiment
ok, so this is seriously cool. I have never heard of Spasmodic Dysphonia, but apparently it is a condition in which the parts of your brain that control speech just shut down. The cause is really not known, and there is no cure. Scott Adams (the dude who writes Dilbert) has been suffering from this for the past 18 months, but decided to try and cure himself. He took the knowledge that the condition only affects certain parts of the brain, and the knowledge that different types of speech (singing, public speaking, talking to a friend, etc) are controlled by different parts of the brain, and started testing. It turns out he could sing, and speak in public, but when it came to everyday conversation, all he could muster was occasional weak whispering.
His idea was to try and remap his brain - try and get a part of his brain that handles singing, to take over the functionality of the damaged part of his brain. Remapping is a familiar phenomenon - stroke patients benefit from remapping when they recover certain functionality because new parts of the brain can be trained to e.g. move a leg, blink, etc. Conversely, it has been shown with imaging techniques that the parts of the brain that were dominant in processing sensation and movement in limbs that have been amputated.
OK, enough cogsci stuff. The point is that Scott Adams succeeded: Scott Adams' Good News.
He managed (at least temporarily) to regain his speech after repeating a simple rhyme. It seems that through this process of repeating, the part of his brain that controls speech in rhyme was able to take over controlling normal speech.
This is awesome. Really cool. I hope for his sake, and for everyone else who suffers from this, that this turns out to be a long-term "fix". Yay cognitive science : )
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Posted by lara at October 25, 2006 10:27 AM
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