Stuttering Devices

StutterTalk is trying out a shorter format: sessions of less than 10 minutes. Good idea! Make it sharp, short, one topic, and more people will listen. But not every day, but 2-3 times a week. The longer sessions are really more of a series of topics with a guest and more in depth, and one every 2 week published for a weekend is best in my humble view.

One of the first topics was Do people stutter when alone? I don't like the language and arguments they used: only introspective and phenomenological. They truly live and think in a 20th century way devoid of deeper neurobiological understanding and perspective. My extra view points are

1) Talking alone is very different to talking to yourself in terms of which brain areas are involved.


2) Being in front of someone changes your body language, and emotional state via a change in neurotransmitter level.

3) You have to formulate as you speak.

4) You need to respond to your changing environment and ideas being discussed.

5) You have learned a lot of behaviours and associated emotional states to talking in front of people (because jamming is more frequent)

6) To conclude, there is so much more going on in terms of processing. It's like having 10 windows open on your desktop as opposed to just one!

They also talk about stuttering as a communication disorder. For me stuttering is not a communication disorder per se but rather a disorder leading to communication break-downs, because there is nothing wrong with our cognitive and emotional ability to communicate and understand the various aspects of human communication. Saying it is a communication disorders or a communication issue is barking up the wrong tree. But autism for example is a communication disorder for they are fundamentally limited. I am not sure what to do about deaf people. They have a dysfunction in a sensory function, but not a motor function (well their speech is slurry due to a lack of good hearing.). But then again some can still hear a bit. I guess I associate communication disorder mostly with mental abilities to communicate rather than peripheral sensory or motor abilities needed to communicate well.

What's your opinion?byTom Weidig