Dr. Eddie Chang

very, very precisely activated and very, very precisely controlled in a way to actually create words.

And so in stuttering, there's a breakdown of that coordination.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, part of it is about that anxiety, but a lot of it really has to do with therapy to sort of like work through and think of tricks basically sometimes to create conditions where you can actually get the words to come out.

A lot of some forms of stuttering are really initiation problems.

Just getting started itself is very hard.

You want to start with the initial words.

vowel or consonant, but it won't emit.

So a lot of that therapy is really just focusing on like, how do you create the conditions, you know, for that to happen?

There's another aspect to it that I find very interesting is that the feedback, essentially what we hear ourselves say, for example,

Every time that I say a word, I'm also hearing what I'm saying.

So that's what we call auditory feedback.

That turns out to be very important.

And sometimes when you change that, it can actually change the amount someone stutters for better or for worse.

And it's giving us a clue that the brain is not just focused on sending the commands out, but it's also possibly interacting with the part that is hearing the sounds and

And there's something might be going on in that connection that breaks down when stuttering occurs.

So there are individuals that are stutterers, but they don't stutter all the time.

In those instances, there's something happening in those particular moments where this very, very precise coordination needs to happen in the brain in order to get the words out fluently.