Stuttering, which some experts link to excess dopamine in the brain, affects men four times more than women.
Demosthenes was a famous Athenian orator who lived between 384 and 322 BC. To reinforce his voice and improve his stuttering, he practiced on the beach talking with pebbles in his mouth until he could be heard amid the noise of the waves. He also climbed hills with weight on his chest to increase his lung capacity.
According to the studies carried out so far, 5% of children start with this dysfunction between the ages of 2 and 6 , just at the stage when language learning develops. If prevented in time, it can be totally corrected in 80% of cases.
Aristotle himself thought that people stuttered because they thought faster than they could speak, so that the ultimate responsible for stuttering was the tongue, being unable to keep up with the speed with which ideas flowed.
One of the best films of recent times, “The King’s Speech”, precisely addresses the problem of stuttering in history. Exactly, the film that won the / culture / special / oscar-history-and-curiosities-awards for best film in 2010, deals with the speech that King George VI was to make at the beginning of World War II. To overcome stuttering and give an impression of strength in front of the people, he goes to a speech therapist, Lionel Lodge.
Sigmund Freud thought that stuttering had something to do with excretory functions, as speaking was seen as an act of expelling something to the external world. In this way he was of the opinion that the typical blocks of this problem were a kind of constipation of speech.
Doctor Febricus Hildanus, back in 1608, maintained that stutterers had a frenulum on the tongue that was much fatter than normal , so that his radical solution was precisely to cut that appendix. Obviously the system did not improve stuttering.
Stuttering ” is not a disease and is not associated with any abnormality of any kind, ” the president of the Spanish Foundation for Stuttering, Adolfo Sánchez García, recently explained.
Many celebrities from different fields nurture the long list of stutterers emeritus. Among them are Marilyn Monroe, Miguel de Cervantes, Aristotle, Isaac Newton, George VI, James Stewart Charles Darwin, Clara Barton, Winston Churchill …
Stuttering is not linked to any abnormality, deficiency, or decrease in intelligence . There are also different forms of stuttering: repetition of words, blocks when speaking, lengthening sounds …
Despite all the scientific research that has been carried out on stuttering, there is still no definitive treatment, nor has it been possible to explain this problem. Not even genetics or neuroscience have been able to reveal the keys to stuttering.
