Saturday, October 04, 2008

Half brain

I just saw a documentary on people who only have one half of their cortex (the high-level brain). When they spoke in front of the camera, they seem to have markable disfluencies. They did not stutter but they looked a bit like "recovered" stutterer who control themselves not to stutter but you perceive their mini-block: instead of getting out of control, they just move to the next word after a slight hesitation. Not sure whether it has a connection to stuttering.

1 comment:

JZ said...

BBC has some wonderful documentaries of the brain damaged people. One boy lost his left hemisphere at about 9 and regained speech one or two years later. He showed some dysfluency, which is unlike stuttering to me. Another old Japanese lady lost almost all left hemisphere due to stroke, and her husband took care of her for many years, even published a diary. She could not speak, but she could utter some emotional sounds, with intonation.

I will try to find out the exact documentary names later.