So one of the YouTube drama channels I like to
follow as a guilty pleasure...
[Bell ringing] Shame. Shame.
Usually has a “question you may have trouble answering” at the end. I usually try to answer
it either by posting or putting it in a video like I did with Interstates in Hawaii a few weeks ago.
But this was his question a few days ago: A question you may have trouble answering,
Do stuttering people stutter when they’re thinking to themselves?
What?! Don’t judge me, I’m a single guy. Whites, colours, it doesn’t matter. Anyways, Snaggle,
the gloves are off, challenge accepted.
[Intro music]
There are two parts of speech, mechanical and cognitive. Let’s go ahead and focus on
mechanical for now, since that seems to be what Snaggle wants to know.
Speech impairments are caused by having impairments in the physical production of
the sounds involved in speech. The lips, tongue, and larynx movements involved in the production
of language. These can be caused by having an underlying mental disorder such as anxiety,
which was featured profoundly in the movie The King’s Speech,
or it could be caused by some sort of physical deformity like a cleft palate. Interestingly,
in rare cases, the arrangement of your teeth can actually cause impairments of speech,
so in other words, having snaggle teeth can be a speech impairment. [Ohhhh] Braces on
the other hand actually enhance your speech and make you more
attractive to the opposite sex. [Crying] [Tone] People with mechanical impairments often don’t
have any associated cognitive deficits. They think clearly, so no, they don’t stutter in their heads.
People who do stutter often don’t even stutter when they talk to themselves or to close family
members or other people that they trust, it’s usually just in stressful social situations.
People with a lisp or some sort of physical deformity obviously always have it, but it doesn’t
affect their brain so they still think clearly. So did I really just make a whole video just to
answer one question and then rag on Snaggle? Of course not. We’re gonna go full mythbusters on
this topic. You know like when they find out that the myth actually isn’t true. So then they just
start throwing dynamite at it until it is true. Well… when do people stutter when they think?
This is Sarah Scott. She suffered a stroke in 2009 and acquired Broca’s aphasia.
So what’s your name? Umm… Scott. Oh… no… Sarah Scott.
That’s right. And how old are you? I can’t.
Try. I can’t.
Broca’s aphasia is usually acquired through a stroke to Broca’s area, one of the main language
centers in the brain, located in the anterior left temporal lobe. Due to its location it can
also cause motor weakness to the right arm and leg. It can also be acquired through head trauma
or the always fun herpes encephalitis. I don’t know why I said it like that.
Before Sarah’s stroke she was an extremely bright student expected to go on and do great things.
After her stroke, only her language was affected. Her intelligence, just like that of most people
with aphasia, was left relatively intact. To get a better idea of what Broca’s aphasia is,
imagine you have a mental dictionary. In this mental dictionary, all of the words that you
know and their semantic definitions are tied together. Now imagine you have a stroke. The
words are gone but the definitions remain. So when you’re trying to speak, you know what
you want to say. The white bird with the white meat that tastes delicious when it’s fried.
You know what it is, but you just can’t come up with the word for it. Like a never-ending
cycle of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Or like Sarah. She knows how old she is,
she’s not stupid. She can visualize the number, even count to it, but she just can’t come up
with the words for it when she’s asked how old she is. You might consider that to be “mental
stuttering.” Anyway, the people that you talk to are going to think that you’re pretty stupid,
which couldn’t be further from the truth. Four years into her recovery, she appeared on
a British television show called The Undateables. Now you might be thinking to yourself that they
were just making fun of what they perceived to be a mental disability... and you’d be right,
that’s exactly what they were doing. They showed her unable to send messages on dating
websites or text messages without the help of her mom and this made it impossible for her to
find a date. If you ask me, she just needs to find a guy who understands her condition
and is willing to see past it. (Call me). Sarah has a YouTube channel where she’s
chronicled her entire recovery. Link here and down below. I definitely recommend that
you check it out. A few months ago, she uploaded her seventh annual update. I’m not sure I would
have been able to handle the same struggle as her with the same attitude or success that she’s had.
There is an interesting little loophole to Broca’s aphasia though. It’s common knowledge
that learning a second language as a child is much easier than learning it as an adult. This
is because your brain is much more plastic and adaptive when you’re a child. The magic
age for learning a second language is ten. If you learn a second language before that,
you actually have the possibility of growing a second Broca’s area. So there have been cases
where people had a stroke and should have gotten Broca’s aphasia but only got it to
one of the two languages that they knew. Imagine knowing English and Spanish but just having your
English mental dictionary wiped completely clean. And for those of you who are curious…
[In ASL] Yes, ASL can be lost too. It’s been a while, I hope that was right.
Broca’s Aphasia only affects the production end of the cognitive side of language. On the other end,
we have comprehension. Wernicke’s area – and yes, that’s how I’m going to say it,
I’m American, not German – is where language comprehension takes place and is located in
the posterior left temporal lobe. Wernicke’s aphasia is the natural opposite of Broca’s.
The words in your dictionary are still there, but the definitions are either
lost or scrambled. This can result in a number of symptoms, like rambling speech,
the ultimate in run-on sentences, and talking in circles. Or the milder version,
where words are simply replaced with other words or nonsense and make the sentence unintelligible.
This mild version of Wernicke’s was featured in an episode of House called Failure to
Communicate. The patient would continuously say things like “They took my stain” or “Tackle the
bear.” Of course, House is also a genius linguist who is able to figure out what
those phrases mean by defacing an entire wall in an airport. But how did he know how to do it?
Language is organized in your mind like a web. Do you remember drawing word bubbles
or playing word association games when you were a kid? Well good, because we’re about
to do one right now to illustrate the point. Boom. Okay, now, what is the first word that
comes to mind when I say bird? Most of you, since I mentioned it earlier, were probably primed to
say chicken. Yes, I did that on purpose, clever huh? I might do an episode on priming at some
point. Anyway. If you didn’t think of that, you probably thought of some other extremely common,
annoying bird. But probably none of you thought of the word fly. I didn’t say to think of a bird,
just a word associated with bird. Which fly definitely is as a verb.
But get this. Me saying the word fly caused a ripple effect in your mind and you’re already
primed to say other words. For example, when it’s used as a noun. Or as a verb again. Now if when I
showed the word insect you were thinking “Uhh no, that’s not what I was thinking of!” Well yeah,
I know, you were probably thinking of this. But there’s even more to the way words are
organized in your head. There’s another level above bird and insect. Animals. Typically
when you’re looking for the word fly, you start at the top, the superordinate level.
If I were to point over there and say “Hey, look at that animal!” I’m giving you almost
no information about what to look for other than the fact that it’s alive.
That’s why we’d move on down to the basic level. “Hey, look at that insect over there.” Okay,
now I’m giving you some more information, you know kind of what to look for. Six legs,
maybe some wings, black. But if I really want to get the most specific information to you that
I can, we move on down to the subordinate level. “Look at that fly!” Boom, you know exactly what to
look for now. In normal conversation, we usually just use basic or subordinate words. But they’re
all organized in a complicated web like this. This is what the organization typically
looks like. But with Wernicke’s, the lines of comprehension are scrambled or disappear entirely.
So let’s go back to chicken. You ask someone with Wernicke’s what they want for dinner – chicken of
course, they’re not some sort of vegan monster. So they start the search for the word with
animals but the comprehension lines are gone. So they end up saying that they want planes
for dinner. You explain that that didn’t make any sense, so try again. This time… woah yeah,
that’s even worse. Although Bear Grylls would probably approve.
This is what House was drawing up on the walls, although not nearly as nice and organized.
The scariest part of Wernicke’s aphasia is that the patient is completely unaware that they’re
not making any sense. It all makes sense to them in their minds. They’ll often get frustrated and
think that their friends and family are making fun of them by pretending to not understand. If
it gets bad enough, they can actually lose the ability to understand others completely. This is
like being dropped into a foreign country where everyone else speaks a different language than
you. Only it’s not a foreign country, it’s all of your friends and family. And you know they
should be speaking English but they’re not. This sounds like an episode of The Twilight
Zone and I can’t imagine a worse hell. Luckily… Is that the right word for this?
Thankfully, those with Broca’s aphasia are aware that their language is impaired
so they can actually recover much more quickly. If you’re extremely unlucky,
you can end up with global aphasia, which is both Broca’s and Wernicke’s. Yeah...
There we go. All done. So the next time you have a stroke
or herpes encephalitis… There’s really nothing you can do to prevent getting aphasia. I… I dunno. At
least now you know better... I guess. Good luck? If you enjoyed that video or you learned
something, go ahead and give that like button a click. If you’d like to see more from me, I
put out new videos every weekend, so go ahead give that subscribe button a tickle. I’m almost to 100
subscribers, so why not share this video and get a few of your friends to help bump that number up a
little bit? But in the meantime, if you’d like to watch one of my older videos, how about this one?
[Outro music]