How to Stop Stuttering - What the latest brain scanning techniques tell us

How to Stop Stuttering - What the latest brain scanning techniques tell us

http://ift.tt/2zB8GqN Are you getting the correct advice on how to stop stuttering? Some common sense advice may seem logical but actually do more harm than good to your speech fluency. Learn what you need to do to stop stuttering, and stay fluent. Stuttering is fairly well known to most people such that even any stranger you meet may be inclined to give you advice if you stutter. But why is it that the most common advice may not be helpful in eliminating stuttering at all? One of the most important reasons is that most people don’t realise that for the 1% of the population that stutters, it has been scientifically proven that their brain activity is significantly different from a non-stutterer’s. In other words, advanced brain scanning technology shows that different parts of the brain are activated when a stutterer speaks - even when there is no stuttering in the sentence. This means that if you want to stop stuttering, you need to learn how to use the parts of the brain that should be used, and learn to co-ordinate them in order to speak fluently. You need to ‘rewire’ how you speak. That’s why many speech fluency programs are called ‘speech restructuring’ programs. One myth about how to stop stuttering is that you should just learn to be more confident, or “relax”. It is not about learning to be more confident. Saying that it’s all about being confident would be like saying you can drive a manual car the way you drive an automatic car, and expect it to work - as long as you drive ‘with confidence’. That’s not how it works. As a qualified speech therapist with over 24 years of experience helping clients to stop stuttering and stay fluent, I would like to share some tips based on scientific evidence about how the brain is involved in producing fluent speech with no stutters: 1. One part of the brain that is involved in producing fluent speech without stuttering is the front part of the brain (frontal cortex), which is responsible for how you plan, and execute the ‘motor’ or physical movements for speech (moving your vocal cords, your lips, your tongue etc). Many of the most successful and established speech therapy programs include some form of ‘speech restructuring’, or training the speaker to actively produce speech movements in some new and different ways that are more conducive to fluent speech movements. 2. A second key area of the brain involved when non-stutterers produce fluent speech is the part of the brain that is not involved in producing the movements, but is rather, involved in sensing, or hearing your own speech. This area is at both sides of the brain, especially on the left side, near the ears and is responsible for ‘auditory feedback’, how you hear yourself. It has been well established that if you have earphones on, and hear your own speech played back to you with some very small delays, this ‘delayed auditory feedback’ has a significant effect on speech fluency. What this means is that if you are working on trying to stop stuttering, you should also be aware of the importance of actively listening to yourself. 3. The third key area of the brain activated when non-stutterers produce fluent speech is in the inner part of the brain (basal ganglia, thalamus, and cerebellum) that are responsible for sequencing speech movements, and the timing. What this means is that if you are trying to stop stuttering, you have to learn to consciously sequence speech movements one after another, and pay attention to aspects such as timing, stress of different word syllables etc. As you can see, the latest neuro-imaging technology has pointed the way, or indeed reinforced the importance of working on some very concrete and learnable skills in order to speak fluently in order to say what you want when you want and stop stuttering.
via YouTube https://youtu.be/Db7i-H3HfSM