I cant remember how to stammer! Help!!

I am back from holiday. I went to Spain for a Swedish wedding and afterwards travelled through Andalusia. The Alhambra fortress / gardens / city / palace in Granada is very impressive in magnitude and style built at the times of Arabic control of Southern Spain: see pictures below. So are the bull fight arenas in Sevilla and Alicante, but I didnt see a fight.





Tony (real name?) left a comment: "HELLO TOM YOUR THEORIES HAVE SOME FASCINATING CONCEPTS , CAN THE BRAIN FORGET TO STAMMER IE IN THE CASE OF LOSS OF MEMORY LOSS ? THROUGH DRUGS OR BEING TOTALLY DRUNK ?"

He is asking whether the brain can forget to stammer in case of loss of memory. The answer depends on your theory of PDS and of which memory you are talking about. The word memory is too vague, as there are different types of memory located at different places in the brain. And there is working memory (up to 5 minutes), mid-term memory (up to two years), and long-term memory storage in our brains. There is explicit memory: factual (London is the capital of England), episodic (events in your life) and implicit: motor skills (knowing which muscles to move to skate or ride a bicycle), cognitive skills (chess, bridge).

What makes Tony's question so interesting is that putting on the "loss of memory" glasses would allow us to test (at least theoretically) different types of PDS theories if we were able to control memory loss temporarily. For example, if PDS is psychological and you temporarily erase of episodic memory of stuttering, the person should be completely fluent. If PDS is learned / bad habit, temporarily erasing memory of unnessary motor skills, would make the person fluent or at least eliminate unnecessary body motion. If PDS is purely a neurological weakness, memory loss will not affect stuttering.

My way of looking at PDS is as always: it's a neurological problem first, then acquisition of learned behaviour together with episodal memory of past stuttering. So yes, if you provoke memory loss, I think the person would improve his/her fluency but not be completely fluent and might develop memory producing more disfluency. For example, I think you can see this in kids who stutter or in older adults who have neurogenic stuttering i.e. provoked by stroke or similar illness. They do not have the memory of past stuttering.

I dont know how to knock out memory. I just know of the movie Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind., where this doctor erases bad memories of your ex or your dog that died. Drugs acting on memory might be used for experiments but not for treatment, as the costs are far too great. I'd rather be disfluent that have no memory or be drunk all the time!!

In my next post, I will talk a bit more of Per Alm's PhD thesis that I read in more detail during my Spain trip.