Comment by matthewheath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewheath | Hacker News Reader

I have a stutter. I went to a speech and language therapist, which helped a little bit. For the longest time I couldn't say words like "Wednesday" (stuttering on the W) or even simple phrases like "Yes sir/ma'am" when at secondary school (I believe this is known as a "block", my mouth just wouldn't work; I froze up).

I'm not entirely sure what helped me overcome the problem. If I'm relaxed, my speech is fluent. If I take deep breaths and think about what I'm going to say, the stutter rarely shows up. There are, of course, some words that I mispronounce still like "manipulative".

The only real ongoing issue is the learned habit of speaking quickly to try and overcome the stutter. Internally, I can understand exactly what I said, but externally it apparently comes out as a stream of unintelligible words. That's something I'm still working on.

The stutter comes back when I'm tired, nervous, or stressed. Apart from that, it's barely noticeable which I am pleased about.

How curious to know that it's all in the brain rather than a psychological cause such as anxiety which is what my parents used to assume. Perhaps I shall have to volunteer to help with future research.

I had therapy for years as well, didn't help.

Until one day. They had taught us a very artificial way to speak, a sort of very slow, very loose su-su-stuttering on purpose. 15-year old me hated it.

Then they made us go into stores, and ask for things using this technique. A couple of AA batteries, in my case, using that technique. I dreaded this, thought it was completely ridiculous.

But the guy behind the counter didn't care one bit, bless him. He didn't appear to notice anything and just helped me with my batteries.

That single exercise hammered home that it was ok for me to stutter. Completely unthinkable idea, before then.

That realization reduced the problem by half in one day, and I never really cared about it anymore. It gradually disappeared in twenty five years or so after that without therapy or whatever. It ceased to be a problem for me on that day.

I love this story, thanks for sharing it. It's interesting how frequent behaviors can be changed by seemingly unrelated things, like this tactic.

Interesting. This is basically exposure therapy which is used to treat a number of anxiety related conditions.

For example, for men who have shy bladders (and it can get so bad they can’t pee outside their own homes), the therapy is to go to a public washroom and stand at a urinal for 5 min.

Yeah, 5 min. Don’t even try and pee.

Similar to you, they realize that their anxiety around people caring or even noticing isn’t based on how people would actually react.

The anxiety subsides and typically the physical manifestation of that anxiety also goes away.

Apparently works for fear of heights, fear of flying, etc. in those cases the anxiety is less around other people’s reactions (though it can be - people are fearful they will freak out and embarrass themselves) but just the idea that exposing yourself to anxiety provoking situations for long enough (and in a controlled manner) will cause your brain to react less and less to it in the future.

> exposing yourself to anxiety provoking situations for long enough (and in a controlled manner) will cause your brain to react less and less to it in the future.

Works for me with heights to some extent. When I go skiing, the first day of the season is terrible on the chair lifts. Then it gets better. There's still some height threshold I can't deal with very well, so it's not a perfect solution. But there is an improvement.

What if the stress level affects the dopamine level and that affects the stutter?

I have a stutter too and this was a very interesting article to add to my "head-canon" on why people stutter. My stutter is also affected by moods. Maybe we're living -- or rather, speaking -- on the edge of the brain-body connection.

I had a roommate with a stutter, but never when telling a joke, talking to the dog, or singing. We are way more complicated than we understand!

"never when telling a joke"

Rowan Atkinson has a stutter, but not when he is in character:

https://www.stutteringhelp.org/content/who-knew-mr-bean

"It comes and goes. I find when I play a character other than myself, the stammering disappears. That may have been some of the inspiration for pursuing the career I did."

The singing part has been investigated:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2996848/

> As illustrated in this paper, singing represents a promising therapeutic tool in a variety of neurological disorders. Singing is particularly useful in ameliorating some of the associated speech-motor difficulties because of features such as continuous voicing, decreased production rate, and increased awareness of individual phonemes. Although the precise mechanisms underlying the efficacy of singing remain largely unexplored, a number of hypotheses have been proposed

I stutter on jokes all the time, it’s pretty pathetic. Good for him, sounds uncharacteristic of a stutterer to be honest. But I’ve never heard of anyone who stutters when they sing. Something about singing makes the fluency a lot easier.

It's not pathetic -- do you look at someone in a wheelchair and think how pathetic they are?

It's not pathetic -- it's just some fucking bullshit that happens. We need to cut through all the bullshit and love ourselves. :)

Do you stutter when you are not hearing yourself? For example, if you record yourself with headphones on playing very loud music so that you can not hear your own voice, will you still stutter saying all those things or reading the stuff you stutter on?

Most of the time, yes.

> How curious to know that it's all in the brain rather than a psychological cause such as anxiety

I'm not sure this model of thinking is fully correct. In a way, it's like saying that muscle cramps are all in the muscle rather than in their lack of hydration or their being overworked.

The substance of thought, emotion, and cognition is synapses firing, neurotransmitters transmitting, and neural connections being made. Like muscles, their movements flow as a result of environmental inputs, and environmental inputs that are stronger create stronger adaptations towards them.

The article doesn't say that it's all in the brain.

Yes, that's true. Clumsy wording on my part, sorry.

> If I'm relaxed, my speech is fluent.

Exactly like me. I can say any word, surprisingly in a better way, when I'm alone. I struggle primarily with words starting with T, D like Trajectory, Tutorial, and few more.

Seems intuitive to me. Most things that are at the edge of my ability I can do in relaxed practice but not under stress. Mouth aerobics are just one example.

> If I take deep breaths and think about what I'm going to say, the stutter rarely shows up.

Interesting how that works isn’t it?

Interesting, I don't have a stutter but regularly have issues saying 'statistics' correctly.

It's a tough word with a lot of t's, and s'

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