09: The President's Speech

This is a story about patients that suffer from aphasia. These patients listened to the president talk, and they started laughing at his speech. One of the people that didn’t laugh was a former English teacher by the name Emily D. She listened to the president’s speech careful but wasn’t able to understand his speech.

Aphasia is a speech and communication disorder that’s due to damage in specific parts of the brain. People that suffer from aphasia are unable to understand or use words. It is very common in old people that have had a stroke.

Aphasia leads the person to be unable to talk or understand words spoken by others and it also effects the person's ability to read or write. The language center in the brain if damaged could result in aphasia. Since it is responsible for controlling speech and recognizing language. This part of the brain is in the Broca’s area and the Wernicke’s area. So aphasia is due to damage or injury to any of these parts of the brain or the damage of the pathway that combines them together. This damage and injury can be due to many factors like I said before a stroke, epilepsy, migraine, brain tumor, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

In this story people laugh at the president's speech, one would think why are they laughing if they don’t even understand what the president's saying? It is true they were unable to understand the words the president said, but they were able to know that he was lying, and they were not being deceived by his words. This is why they were laughing. Now you think if they don’t understand his words how could they know that he is saying the truth? Well, the answer to that is that people who have aphasia since they can’t refer to others words to understand, they start paying attention to gestures, tones, and cadences. From looking at all those and putting them together, they can tell whether a person is lying or not. It really amazing how the real meaning of any word it only serves a tiny part of what people rely on to talk and communicate with others.

The only person that didn’t laugh was Emily D she had glioma in her right temporal lobe. Emily was unable to distinguish the tone. She wasn’t able to tell if a voice is happy, sad or angry. So she had to pay really good attention to the words and the way they were used. Emily had a hard time following and understanding the slang language. The speech didn’t affect her at all. The author states what Emily said about the speech, ‘He is not cogent,' she said. 'He does not speak good prose. His word-use is improper. Either he is brain-damaged, or he has something to conceal.'

All these are cases that have the language processing part of the brain injured. So treatments for aphasia is difficult. It is not easy to fix a damaged part of the brain, but, in this case, people that suffer from aphasia can take sessions with a speech-language pathologist. Theses session will help the person’s ability to talk and communicate.