I just saw another wonderful episode of NOVA scienceNOW. If you don't know what that is I strongly suggest you check it out. It is a wonderful program where you can learn interesting bits of science every week. It airs every Wednesday night on KCET.
This last Wednesday's episode was especially interesting because it happened to get into the subject of stuttering and what may be the cause of it. The episode segment was originally about birds and the peculiar ways they sing and the noises they make. They discussed several quite intriguing aspects of bird songs and how they do it and why they do it.
You see, human speech starts in the brain(the same with birds) and then takes no less than 100 muscles to actually say something. There is a part of the brain that makes one understand the words(Broca's area), which I'm certain most stutterers are very advanced in (wink wink) , then there is the part of the brain that helps produce the word (auditory cortex). These two parts of the brain must communicate via some complex neuro-circuitry in order for one to produce normal speech.
With this information, Dr. Santosh Helekar, an associate research professor of neuroscience at the Methodist Neurological Institute wants to decipher a very important speech mystery, stuttering. It may seem crazy at first, but humans aren't the only ones who possess this very troublesome disorder. Birds seem to have it as well, and Dr. Santosh happens to have a couple Zebra Finches that have this impediment. They have trouble producing the regular patterns of sounds that are normally attributed to such birds; They keep rapidly repeating single sounds much like the way many stutters repeat syllables like t-t-t-t-talk.
In order to study this, Santosh along with his colleague Henny Vose does a brain scan on his birds using an improvised technique to perform an FMRI scan on little birds. When the birds start chirping, the scanner picks up increased blood flow in the part of the brain used to process sound. When the brain of a normal bird is compared with that of a stuttering bird, it is seen that there is less activity in that part of the brain in a stuttering bird. The same pattern was then found in human brains! All this was possible because humans and our little flying friends have similar DNA when it comes to speech (May be that explains how parrots can repeat words and phrases) But rest assured, If you are a stutterer, this does not mean that you are retarded. It just means that when it come to saying words, the nerve communications in your brain have a little trouble. This has nothing to do with intelligence or the ability to think the words.
