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2:09pm June 27, 2014
Anonymous asked: Do you know of any studies or articles which refer to this part of your recent post? (This is apparently a known thing that even happens to people who lose receptive language during brain injuries and the like: It can sometimes take really specific testing to keep them from fooling you into believing they understand every word you’re saying.)

Yeah, something written by Oliver Sacks about people with receptive aphasia listening to politicians, vs. people with tonal agnosia listening to politicians.  Or something like that.  Like watching politicians on TV and laughing because their aphasia/agnosia made it plainly clear that they were lying.  (My friend actually sometimes has me deliberately turn language off to evaluate certain things about people’s character, so that part seems to run true as well.)

Here I found it:

http://www.indiana.edu/~jkkteach/P335/PresidentsSpeech.html

Here’s the exactly quote:

It was often said of these patients, who though intelligent had the severest receptive or global aphasia, rendering them incapable of understanding words as such, that they none the less understood most of what was said to them. Their friends, their relatives, the nurses who knew them well, could hardly believe, sometimes, that they were aphasic.

This was because, when addressed naturally, they grasped some or most of the meaning. And one does speak ‘naturally’, naturally.

Thus, to demonstrate their aphasia, one had to go to extraordinary lengths, as a neurologist, to speak and behave unnaturally, to remove all the extraverbal cues-tone of voice, intonation, suggestive emphasis or inflection, as well as all visual cues (one’s expressions, one’s gestures, one’s entire, largely unconscious, personal repertoire and posture): one had to remove all of this (which might involve total concealment of one’s person, and total depersonalisation of one’s voice, even to using a computerised voice synthesiser) in order to reduce speech to pure words, speech totally devoid of what Frege called 'tone-colour’ (Klangenfarben) or 'evocation’. With the most sensitive patients, it was only with such a grossly artificial, mechanical speech –somewhat like that of the computers in Star Trek– that one could be wholly sure of their aphasia.

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this