HWN Suggests

Thoughts That Can’t Be Spoken

Unable to put my thoughts into words, I tried to find synonyms for what I knew I was trying to say. Again, a simile might help: It was as if, traveling down a stream, I had come to a dam that blocked my way and sought to find a side canal to allow my passage.

For instance, in the hospital, discovering that it was impossible to say, “My reflective functions are fine, but I find speaking difficult,” I managed to blurt out to the doctor: “I have words.”

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Featured

  The Shattered Mind

In 1861, a young French physician named Paul Broca published an account of a patient who had suffered a stroke years earlier that had left him almost totally deprived of speech. Rather than rendering him completely mute, however, the stroke had spared until the end the patient's ability to speak in a short, laborious “telegraphic” style.

 My crash course in aphasia, the debilitating loss of the ability to talk

When Helen Harris came round from brain surgery, she found she couldn’t even say her own name. She describes her slow recovery – and how to react to someone with the condition.

Articles of Interest

'I Want To Do More': Gen. Michael Hayden On Living With Speech-Inhibiting Aphasia

Here's the thing, though - aphasia does not affect intelligence. General Hayden can think as well as he ever did. He just can't say what he thinks. Here's another thing - he's doing therapy. He attends an aphasia support group over Zoom on Saturday mornings. He's fighting, and he's getting better.

At 60, He Learned to Sing So He Could Learn to Talk

Few people over the age of 10 would list “Happy Birthday” among their favorite songs. But Harvey Alter, now 62, has a special fondness for it. It helped teach him how to talk.

In Brooklyn, stroke patients learn to speak again–in two languages

Aphasia patients, often elderly and carrying the burdens of life, have seen their lives changed dramatically–in many ways, for the worse. So how did one rehabilitation group, deep in Brooklyn, become the happiest place in New York City?

Paul Broca's Great Discovery Also Reminds Us That Scientists Are Fallible

Broca's discovery marked the first known link between a specific region of the brain and a specific neurological function. Scientists have since discovered many others, and we now have a reasonably good map of which parts of the brain are linked to which functions - although the idea that their shape is linked to personality traits, let alone that the shape of a person's skull can predict their character, has long since been thoroughly discredited.

Singing Therapy Helps Stroke Patients Speak Again

For more than 100 years, it's been known that people who can't speak after injury to the speech centers on the left side of the brain can sing. In the 1970s, Boston researchers started to use a sort of "singing therapy" to help stroke survivors speak again.

What brain regions control our language? And how do we know this?

In 1861, French neurologist Pierre Paul Broca described a patient unable to speak who had no motor impairments to account for the inability. A postmortem examination showed a lesion in a large area towards the lower middle of his left frontal lobe particularly important in language formulation. This is now known as Broca’s area. The clinical symptom of being unable to speak despite having the motor skills is known as expressive aphasia, or Broca’s aphasia.

Why Broca's Area Damage Does Not Result in Classical Broca's Aphasia

Classical Broca's area represents just a step in the brain language production system. Noteworthy, damage in other areas of this language production system, can also result in language production deficits, though with some idiosyncratic characteristics.

Resources

National Aphasia Association

Individuals with Broca’s aphasia have trouble speaking fluently but their comprehension can be relatively preserved. This type of aphasia is also known as non-fluent or expressive aphasia.

Tactus Therapy

Broca’s aphasia is primarily an expressive language impairment, meaning it mostly affects speaking and writing – the two ways we produce, or express, language. Comprehension of language remains relatively intact in Broca’s aphasia, while repetition of words and sentences is usually poor.

StatPearls

Broca aphasia is a non-fluent aphasia in which the output of spontaneous speech is markedly diminished and there is a loss of normal grammatical structure.