commentr/StutterNovember 10, 2023

Content

The naming convention is meaningless to you and meaningless to me, as I literally said in the closing paragraph of a comment you replied to: "The types are simply used to describe the manner in which people's stutters began. As it stands, there aren't specific treatments depending on the type of stutter, and so typology doesn't serve much function." No one's ruling anything out. The experience you're describing occurs due to an impairment in the connection between the ventral premotor cortex and the striatum, part of the basal ganglia. The hyperdirect dopaminergic pathway bypasses the striatum and projects to the subthalamic nucleus, with the function of movement inhibition. That's the disconnect you experience. The left hemisphere, which is specialized in the motor execution of speech, becomes inhibited. The right hemisphere, more specialized in auditory function subject to our own speech, is responsible for error detection and correction and so it sends excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate to the left auditory cortex. I hypothesize this to be the reason why stutterers have increased glutamate levels in the left auditory cortex but decreased in the left inferior frontal gyrus compared to fluents. This feeds a positive feedback loop where we become hyper-aware of our own speech and produces a counter-intuitive effect. I am further hypothesizing that the problem with our speech is because the speech motor command in itself contains the inhibitory hyper-direct dopamine pathway function to the anticipation of our blocks based on our past experiences. The hyper-direct pathway in the basal ganglia is bilaterally represented, but the specific actions it influences can be lateralized depending on which hemisphere predominantly controls the motor action. In this case, if the left hemisphere becomes inhibited with a block occurring, the error-detection feedback mechanism of the right hemisphere activates to compensate for its inhibition. If the left hemisphere is responsible for opening motion and execution, whereas right hemisphere for error-detection and inhibition, this hypothesis could be used to explain the specialized function of the left hemisphere in speech. How so? Because we would only need to engage our right hemisphere in observation of objects external to us. Same as we cannot tickle ourselves because the brain already contains the efference copy, we have no need for engagement of the right hemisphere because the closing motion of our speech motor execution is already contained in the efference copy. You wanted nuance, right? This is the hypothesis I derived. Speculative for the most part, but could potentially prove novel and groundbreaking. I'm a sales agent who sells paints from a war-torn country with no formal education in neither neuroscience, biology, medicine, nor chemistry. I experienced the same experience you did, but I went one step further to understand nuance and potentially derive a cure. So give me a fucking break with your irking and virtue-signaling. If you cared about nuance, you would take the path I did for 4 years now, or at least to understand the basics. Instead, you lash out in frustration, contributing absolutely nothing constructive about the topic at hand, which had nothing to do with the science of it. Sit down, be humble.

Themes

Causes & VariabilityAnticipation & AvoidanceEmotional Experience

Subthemes

Neurological & BrainOverthinking & MonitoringStress & Fight/FlightHelplessness & Agency