Scott Adams went mute a year and a half ago. but oddly enough the muteness was contextual instead of total:

I lost my voice about 18 months ago. Permanently. It’s something exotic called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Essentially a part of the brain that controls speech just shuts down ... The weirdest part of this phenomenon is that speech is processed in different parts of the brain depending on the context. So people with this problem can often sing but they can’t talk. In my case I could do my normal professional speaking to large crowds but I could barely whisper and grunt off stage. [Link]

So, like any good geek, Scott Adams hacked his own brain:

Just because no one has ever gotten better from Spasmodic Dysphonia before doesn’t mean I can’t be the first... I observed when my voice worked best and when it was worst and looked for patterns.

My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess of what’s happening with Spasmodic Dysphonia. It’s somewhat mysterious.) And so I reasoned that there was some way to remap that connection. All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar – but still different enough – from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped. Well, that was my theory. But I’m no brain surgeon.[Link]

Guess what - he did it! He used the power of rhyme!

The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly...Then something happened.

My brain remapped.

My speech returned. [Link]

He wasn't 100% better yet, but a few more doses of RHYME and he was all cured:

A few times I felt my voice slipping away, so I repeated the nursery rhyme and tuned it back in. By the following night my voice was almost completely normal. [Link]

The next time he brain goes under, I'm going to suggest dirty limerics. Anything "Jack be nimble" can do "There once was a man from Nantucket" can do better.

[Story via Manish]

Ennis posted this on October 25, 2006
It is filed under Science & Technology

It is also indexed with the following tags: Linguistics | Dilbert | Brain | Psychology |