Friday, September 22, 2006

Thinking in terms of circuit

Suddenly, many new ideas are popping up in my brain and floating around. Here is No 1: I noticed that I should probably think more in terms of circuits being dysfunctional rather than separate brain modules. The big advantage is that this more "system" (as opposed to local) way of thinking allows me to state that "The cause of stuttering is a defect somewhere in circuit X" rather than "For some, brain region A is not working well, in others the fibers connecting to region A and B are not well insulated". It might well be that stuttering occurs if any of the regions or fibers connecting the regions WITHIN a circuit is malfunctioning. So the goal should be to single out the circuit. So there might be a unifying way of encompassing all people who stutter, and difference can be explained by subtleties coming from where in the circuit the malfunctioning happens.

An interesting side product of this way of thinking is that there is a more natural way of asking why people with PDS seem to have inferior dual task performance. You can ask what is the region(s) that both dual-task circuit and stuttering circuit share. This would also lead to the conclusion that not all people with PDS should have inferior dual-task performances, as the stuttering circuit will NOT share all the same regions as the dual task circuit. So I would predict that only a subset of people with PDS would have inferior dual task performance i.e. only those that have a malfunctioning region / fibre, that also lies on the dual task circuit, in the stuttering circuit.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In other words, finally we can apply the scientific principle called Ockham's razor to the hypotheses that intend to explain the stutter, that is: "A plurality (of reasons) should not be posited without necessity" [William de Ockham (1285-1349)]. Now, there is a filter.

Em outras palavras, finalmente podemos agora aplicar o princípio científico da navalha de Ockham às hipóteses que pretendem explicar a gagueira, ou seja:
"Uma pluralidade (de razões) não deve ser invocada sem que haja necessidade" [William de Ockham (1285-1349)]. Agora, há um filtro.

Tom Weidig said...

And we now have theories that can be falsified.