The Man Who Lost His Language

Firstly, I'd like to point on the spelling mistake in ITALICS on the first line of the article, in which the review refers to a book titled "The man who LIST his language". Nice.

Anyway, this illness which is referred to in the article, aphasia, is something that has interested me (and probably anyone else who has heard of it/witnessed it) since a visit one of my mom's friends had a stroke and ended up "losing his language" about 5 years ago, although I didn't know it by its technical name back then. We also learned about it in Psych 01 recently, which made this article catch my eye.

Basically, the article describes a man whose "intelligence was not affected by his stroke. He could read books (at an astonishing rate), follow a conversation and travel. 'His semantic understanding of words and pictures was 100 per cent, as was his ability to read and copy upper-case as well as lower-case letters' (166). His loss of language concerned mainly loss of spoken language and writing."

It reminds me of a meeting my mother's friend during his recovery period. He was just learning to speak again, but what we interesting was that he could understand everything that was going on around him, yet he still couldn't do anything but make baby noises in response. And the fact that he could just lose that specific part of his brain in an instant, leaving the rest almost unaffected, blew my 13-year-old mind.

I've visited him since then and he relearned English since then (he now speaks with some what of an accent, not sure if it would even be called that), but if I remember correctly, during the in-between time he would communicate by writing on a pad of paper. This confused me even more because how could someone who couldn't speak coherently remember how to spell? I don't know about you but I still sound words out sometimes...

I looked at my psych textbook, which, by the way, was penned by my psych teacher (just thought I would throw that fun fact in there. When I found that out I almost peed my pants.) for some more insight into the disease. I found it really interesting because the disorder is so indicative of how the brain works. The book says that the reason for this type of illness is simple: "Like most mental activities, language use ... involves many different steps, many different processes. These include processes needed to "look up" word meanings in one's "mental dictionary", processes needed to figure out the structural relationships within a sentence, processes needed to integrate information gleaned about a sentence's structure with the meanings of the words within the sentence, and so on, Since each of these processes relies on its own set of brain pathways, damage to those pathways disrupts the process. As a result, the language loss observed in aphasia is often quite specific - with impairment to a particular processing step, followed by a disruption of all subsequent processes that depend on that step."

Two examples of aphasia that relate back to damage to specific areas along the pathway of information transfer include nonfluent and fluent. Nonfluent is the type I have witnessed, and the one which is mentioned in the article, which Fluent is the opposite: a type in which sufferers are able to produce speech, however do not seem to be able to understand it.

An example of the difference between fluent and nonfluent aphasia was given in our lecture and I stole this example from Professor Gross's Slide show:



Link to the Article:
http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=3850&cn=396