There are speech centers in both the left brain and the right brain.  It appears that one becomes primary and the stutterer is fluent when in the right brain.  Bad early childhood experiences such as fear and humiliation will put him into the left brain in order to access the functions of  self protection.  When there however, he  hears himself speak with a time lag.  The time lag is similar to one when calling into a talk show with the radio on… it’s very confusing.  Repetitive word stuttering is a mechanism to gain time to get back to the right brain speech center and the blocking form of stuttering is when he is caught on the bridge between left and right brain, the Corpus Callosum.

When speaking his first concern is to avoid the blocking  and within split seconds, he assess the audience’s nuance toward him from the framework of  ‘am I safe?’  In the same second, he is thinking of what he’s going to say, evaluating the word for possible blockage and finding a substitute word that means exactly the same thing.

Stutterers are in reality brilliant and if they were not inclined that way, the mechanics of stuttering creates the skills needed for brilliance.

Most stutterers can eventually pass as fluent, unless someone or something ‘outs’ them.  Then all is lost.  In their mind, they are always at the edge of that cliff.

An otherwise severe stutterer becomes fluent while singing, acting, speaking to large groups, speaking while concentrating on a right brain task such as sports or painting and retelling stories with exactly the same words because these are all completely right brain functions.  You will see this in the list of famous stutterers below.

Filed under: CHILDREN, PARENTING, STUTTERING