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DOES HYPER-AROUSAL OF THE BROCA AND WERNICKE’S SPEECH CENTERS REALLY CAUSE STUTTERING?
All scientific research papers written on stuttering state that stuttering is the result of hyper-arousal of the speech centers in the stutterers’ brain during their speech. However, the data obtained by the Russian prof. Roman Snezhko does not support and proves a total insufficiency of such assumption of the traditional approach.
According to scientific discoveries of a well-known Russian professor Ivan Pavlov, any arousal of a neuron is caused by its action of transferring neuron’s impulse to a body part. SPEECH neurons are in charge for SPEECH ACTIONS only! A human performs a speech action as a result of arousal of his/her speech centers and vice versa - the speech action causes increased arousal of speech centers. The following connection takes place within our body: Speech Center – Speech Action. This link between the Brain Center and the Action, whichthis part of the brain is responsible for performing of, is true for any humans’ action and any part of their brain. This means that when we perform an action, our brain neurons that are in charge for performing of this action, remain active; if we do not perform this action, then these same neurons remain inactive because they simply have been left without power.
Therefore, stuttering presents as stopping and skipping of some speech actions; it is caused by slowing down of the speech actions and moments of decreased activity of the brain neurons, but not by arousal or hyper-arousal of Speech Centers/neurons. If the brain speech neurons were hyper-aroused, then, this would have triggered some hyper activity of speech actions.
Some of you may ask: “Isn’t it what we see in speech actions of stuttering individuals when they tense their muscles? Isn’t it the result of their brain’s hyper-arousal?”
To respond to this question, let’s first answer the other one: “Is the action of muscle tension really the speech one?” NO! Even though the tension may occur in such organs as the tongue and lips, however, it has nothing to do with speech production. Why?
Your tongue and lips are responsible for the performance of not just speech actions, but also for the following nonverbal actions: expressing emotions, mimicking, smiling, chewing, or drinking. People who stutter do not realize the difference between such nonverbal actions and the ones that are performed by the same body organs as tongue and lips to produce sounds. While performing a nonverbal action, stuttering individuals mistakenly expect such action to produce sounds. Stutterers initiate a nonverbal action in order to perform the action that produces speech. As the result, a hyper-arousal occurs in the brain center that is responsible for the performance of nonverbal actions and not in the speech center. Hyper-arousal of this brain center (responsible for nonverbal actions) makes his/her speech centers slow down, stop, and skip necessary speech actions because the speech neurons are being left without power at this moment. This power is being pulled away from the speech neurons to supply the nonverbal action. Because stutterer’s tongue and lips have already been involved into performing of one, NONVERBAL, action, they cannot perform another VERBAL action at the same moment.
Roman Snezhko labels this phenomenon by the word STUPOR. Professor I.P. Pavlov described this as an “inhibition by arousal”, as an inhibition/slow downing of one brain center’s activity by the arousal/activation of the other one. From outside, it looks like suppressing of one action by performing of another one.
Now, based on this law of physiology formulated by Ivan Pavlov, the mechanism of stuttering becomes clear: a stutter uses his tongue and lips to perform nonverbal actions for production of sounds, and no matter how forceful his attempts are, he obviously cannot be successful in doing this. People who stutter slow dawn/inhibit their speech centers (that are responsible for the actions of their tongue and lips) because they do not use them for their designed purpose – they use them for nonverbal actions instead. As the result, their NONVERBAL CENTER (which is responsible for mimicking, for example) becomes hyper-aroused and forces the SPEECH CENTERS to stop functioning. Such stoppage leads to the lack of appropriate sound production: skipping of or stumbling on a sound, at the moment.
How to eliminate these stupors in order to prevent the hyper-arousal of nonverbal and inhibition of speech actions? The answer is very simple: stutterers should stop performing all their nonverbal actions and learn how to correctly perform only speech producing actions instead.
The Program of Speech Education ETALON, by Prof. Snezhko, uses a resonance tuning technique, it teaches model-like speech actions to people with various speech problems, including, but not limited to stuttering.
R.A. Snezhko
Moscow, Russia
May 30, 2012
