The Neurological Causes of Stuttering :: Biology Essays Research Papers

The Neurological Causes of Stuttering There are 55 million people all over the world who suffer from stuttering and about 3 million live in the Unites States. This disability has been misunderstood for hundreds of years, but it affects more men then women and it often runs in the family. People who stutter when they speak are sometimes considered to be slower, mentally, then people who can speak fluently. Although research has made some progress in diagnosing the causes of stuttering, people still have preconceptions about stutterers. There are new studies being done to find genetic and neural links to explain and perhaps help cure this potentially isolating disorder. One of the problems that stutterers face in society is the fast pace that people talk. When trying to talk in public, people will often try and finish a sentence for someone who is stuttering. This seemingly harmless act can often cause the stuttering to be worse, because the person who stutters will be more conscious of the fact that they are talking slowly and they will try to speed up, only to trip and stumble on more words. This disability is interesting because it is not always present in a stutterers daily activities. It has been found that talking to pets, singing, acting and whispering often make the disability disappear (4). On the other hand when the person has to talk to someone of authority or try to impress someone, the stuttering becomes a severe speech block (3). This dramatic variation in speech ability lead to the investigation of the causes of stuttering. People who stutter, obviously don’t lack the ability to talk fluently but rather have an interference in that ability (3). To find out if there was a neurological link in the brain that caused people to stutter, a PET imaging study was performed comparing stutterers’ brains and non-stutterers’ brains. This study showed that stutterers may be using the right hemisphere of their brain when they are talking, which means that the left hemisphere (the one usually responsible for speech) is being interrupted (4). Stutterers still complain that when they do have to talk, they feel a lot of nervousness and stress, but doctors are now starting to think that these feelings don’t start the stuttering but rather aggravate the problem (4). The interesting thing with the brain patterns is that they are present even when the stutterers aren’t talking.