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"Dilbert" Creator Gets Voice Back
Scott Adams lost his voice 18 months ago to a disorder called Spasmodic Dysphonia. One day, it returned. He is apparently the first person in history to recover from this malady. Read his account. It is inspirational. I can't find any other word for it.
Stop using the Enlightenment icon for unrelated stories, kdawson. I don't think it means what you think it means.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Fellow Dilbertites,
:)
It seems the great overloard Adams was in fact inflicted by the great malady. Rejoice at his miraculous recovery!
PS - I was quite confused at first as to the authenticity of this until I got goog-learned. It seems it really does exist, he very well may have had it, and if he recovered was indeed a miracle. However, it could also be an elaborate ruse, as I would expect from a satirist of his pedigree.
That leaves me speechless.
Sorry...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
While teaching the course his voice was like a hoarse whisper. He characterised it as having "forgotten" how to speak. But while telling the class about his voice, he said he could sing. And suddenly as singing his voice was loud and strong.
I wished he did that for the whole course.
I imagine he is the first person in recorded history. Just because we haven't seen it posted on slashdot before (then duped 15 times) doesn't mean it hasn't happened before.
In what way would pretending to have a rare illness and then pretending to be cured be satire? There is a difference between "lies" and "satire."
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Congratulations to Mr. Adams. Everyone is glad to hear that you can speak again.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
whats bad is if YOUR OFFICE actually tries some of the boneheaded stuff found on Dilbert.
It kind of like Lincoln during the civl war he read joke books just so he wouldn't waste time weeping.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
He's my hero! I read his comics every day. He deserves his voice :)
Why? Because some of us are actually interested in Enlightenment's development and upcoming release. As it is this is something very much like bait and switch. I see the icon, and get a craptasic story instead of something related to E. Is it so fucking hard to cook up a human interest icon? Maybe a fluffy kitten, or a pink pony?
Slashdot had a voice
Wikipedia has a nice article on Spasmodic Dysphonia.
As the blog indicates, this is thought to be a neurological condition. When I was studying AI as an undergrad, we learned a lot about neural networks. This seems like the sort of thing that could happen if the brain's speech area's neurons somehow became trained to stop delivering impulses for "normal" speech. In this case, it would be theoretically possible to train the network back to normal levels. Of course, it could be something completely different.
Here's wishing Scott the best.
Screw itsatrap tags, try itsamiracle tags instead!
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
Thank fuck for that - I thought I was deaf.
Mr Adams is extremely good at thinking creatively at problems. In the back of one of his books ( i can't remember which ) he talks about his experimentation with affirmations. It was extremely interesting to read about his testing and just the way he thinks. I envy his ability to reason through and logically deciefer things he doesn't initially understand.
Nice to hear you got your voice back.. now get back to drawing funny stuff!
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
He is apparently the first person in history to recover from this malady.
This is great news for all the iPod owners out there - the last year and half of his podcasts have been extremely boring...
I swear if I were him I'd keep using the Enlightenment icon for stories of inspiration just for the near-violent reaction it gets. No offense, but you're all rather uptight in an amusing sort of way.
Maybe you should trying sending in some ideas as that's where most of Scott's storylines come from these days. OTOH, better still, try *your* hand at a 10year comic strip, see if you can run the distance. Good luck with that.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
I think you missed the point - the boneheaded stuff is in Dilbert *because* it occurs in your office. How many dilbert cartoons have you read, and thought - he's been round here looking through the windows!
:-)
Its basically observational comedy - standups do it all the time, and it works. Find something that people recognise and emphasise the parts of it that are dysfunctional. I suppose we laugh about it because we'd cry otherwise
Thanks, I changed this. There really is no perfectly appropriate topic for this story.
I've been fascinated with speech conditions, primarily because of the nature of how people end up compensating and communicating. It's definitely related to something neurological, because scientists have shown that, for example, you use different parts of your brain when you speak personally vs when you sing. I've also seen people who, when they act on stage or in screen, speak in perfect diction, tone, and with great command, but if asked to improvise or speak informally, they say umm a lot and/or seem very nervous. A prepared speech in front of many people would often work, neurologically, the same way as an acting or singing performance.
I wish Scott Adams the best. He's one of the gods in the geek pantheon, and it would be sad for him to suffer so when he brings joy to so many of us.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
satire - noun
1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.
2. a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.
3. a literary genre comprising such compositions.
In what way would pretending to have a rare illness and then pretending to be cured be satire? There is a difference between "lies" and "satire."
I think that were the poster's theory correct definition #2 would clearly apply. Also the determination of whether a statement constitutes a lie or is otherwise a deception is completely irrelevant to the question of whether it qualifies as satire, or was meant in that vein.
Reminds me of a Monty Python sketch where one of the characters was unable to say the letter "c" because of a trauma he had suffered as a sbhoolboy, so he used "b" instead. Midway through the sketch, it was pointed out to him that he could talk normally if he instead used "k" for "c".
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
In honor of this situation, I say we rename the disease to Dilbert's Syndrome. Note how Dilbert has no mouth? Think about it :)
;)
You think this is callous? Far from it! Again we name it this way in order to honor the first person who kicked it. And I think Scott would enjoy the irony of having a neurological disease named after one of his characters. Scott Adams is all about Irony
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Enlightening, perhaps?
I recently stumbled across his book God's Debris (Free PDF file) at http://images.ucomics.com/images/pdfs/sadams/godsd ebris.pdf. I'm not real a big fan of Dilbert and only read a handful of the comics but this book is very interesting.
Why? Because some of us are actually interested in Enlightenment's development and upcoming release. As it is this is something very much like bait and switch. I see the icon, and get a craptasic story instead of something related to E. Is it so fucking hard to cook up a human interest icon? Maybe a fluffy kitten, or a pink pony?
This is a great idea, and I don't know why you were modded to zero. We need a human-interest type of category. I suggest a kitten crossed with a pony, like the skull and crossbones. I for one, welcome our new kitten/pony icon/category overlords!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
A preacher that runs the largest Sunday School in New York City had a similar problem and it similarly went away one day. I'm not sure if it was exactly the same disease, but it was very close if not.
Not to take away from Scott Adams' amazing accomplishment of trying to remap his own brain (and succeeding!), but he may not have been the first or the only.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
Here are two facts that align with TMS:
- it doesn't have a well-described physical mechanism -- i.e. doctor's don't understand specifically the physical mechanism of the diease
- the fact that it is a phenomena of the muscles align with other TMS diagnoses -- in this case paralysation instead of oxygen deprivation.
Now before any of you claim that the two are mutually contradictory, understand this: the doctors don't have any explanation for *why* Scott's muscles are paralysed. They just are. They have no reason or cause not to be working; they just don't. There is no diease, such as injury, bacteria, virus, or anything that would have paralysed these otherwise working muscles. They just aren't working. But, the person can sing.The fact that Scott was able to work his way out of it through self-hypnosis, visualization, and practice, seems to indicate that it was something in the mind. Sarno's course of treatment for TMS includes such activities. He also recommends psychotherapy for dealing with emotions.
In fact, in Sarno's recent book _The Divided Mind_, he recounts a story about a famous turn-of-the-century hypnotist who was able to cure a person's muteness, while they were under hypnosis.
I'm not in favor of going to herbs and drumming for medicine. But it seems to me that emotional issues causing physical problems are an unexplored and undertreated area of modern American medicine.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Does this have anything to do with the return of Loud Howard? (I wonder?)
Scott Adams himself would testify that it's fun to tweak brittle people.
If anyone thinks I'm serious, you're just being silly.
Terrible karma and aiming lower, which in this environment of one-sided reason, is higher.
Neural networks, as used in artificial intelligence, have traditionally been viewed as simplified models of neural processing in the brain, even though the relation between this model and brain biological architecture is very much debated.
The Raven
Mine was of a much more temporary nature but still frightening.
I had been playing basketball at the gym one evening and took a good elbow to the head down in the post that put me on the floor. Hurt, but didn't knock me out or anything. I got up and continued playing the rest of the game. I didn't think much of it at the time. I went home, grabbed a shower and headed for bed. I was single at the time so I didn't chat with anyone at home.
The next day I got up, felt fine, went to work. Someone came over to ask me a question and as I responded, the words were just a jumble. I couldn't pronounce anything. Sounded like I was just mumbling some unintelligible garbage.
My vocal cords were fine. I could make sounds. I could understand people. I could write responses on paper. I just couldn't form words. I headed to the ER.
Anyhow there was nothing they could do for me. The scans showed no dangerous swelling that needed immediate attention, but obviously something had been short circuited in my speech center. I took me a good month+ to get back to where I could speak more or less fluidly again.
For me, it wasn't a "one day I could talk again" sort of thing. I had to work at it every day. I'd practice speaking in the mirror. I could speak very very slowly if I concentrated on each sound I wanted to make.
Anyhow I just wanted to convey some sympathy towards Scott Adams' situation.
You are so correct sir. I've never seen so much whining done over such a completely meaningless icon. Can we have a "stuck up nerd" icon as well?
No offense, but many of you need to get laid, and fast.
Observational comedy may be funny when it's insightful, or adds some original twist.
Dilbert just reads like "stick it to da man" comedy normally targetted at teenagers and angry young adults, but this time for whining, cowardly nerds of all ages who think they're the victims. It's like Ricky Gervais' The Office, and all that resonates is a smug author with little to offer.
And it wouldn't matter so much if I didn't have to hear terms like "PHB" enter the office vernacular, born of the usual geekish miscomprehension of the nature of business and motivations of management.
I stopped getting the Botox shots because although they allowed me to talk for a few weeks, my voice was too weak for public speaking.
I knew in my heart he added this: "And it made me look younger than my age, which was kind of a bummer."
He was screwing with us (though in a good way?) After reading that, I realised most religions work by encouraging wishful thinking, not critical thinking.
Ponies!!!!!!111
or is that
www.cuteoverload.com
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I, for one, will celebrate this most joyous of news with a Dilbert pumpkin. I call for all /.ers to join me -- let it be forever known as the Halloween of Dilbert.
The majority of things that happened on Dilbert actually happened in real life in the jobs of Adams or one of his cow orkers.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Seems like Adams also suffers from focal dystonia, "Adams was diagnosed with the condition -- a neurological movement disorder, marked by involuntary muscle spasms--back in 1992...The problem affects his right hand -- the one he uses to draw."
c le/2005/05/09/AR2005050901066.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
Did someone say ponies? ...
like omg! p0n13z!!1!!
(I have no idea why I think this is as funny as I do. Honestly.)
No shit. This entire "Enlightenment icon" thread is worth its own Dilbert strip. Hey, geeks: try living up to a positive stereotype once in awhile, just to see how it feels.
First up, congratulations to my favourite cartoonist for getting his voice back!
I'm curious though. These days we can image individual atoms, and build things on a molecular scale. Yet in many ways medicine is still in the dark ages - there's so much we don't know or even begin to understand about the human body.
Why? Hard to say. Sure the human body is extremely complex, but it seems to me that modern medicine seems almost archaic at times.
Most common technique for fixing people? A person with a sharp blade - a method most likely pioneered by the ancient Egyptians nearly 5000 yrs ago.
Most common technique for finding out what's happening inside someone? Firing X-rays at a piece of film - a process pretty much unchanged since the late 1800's.
Most common method for curing bacterial infection? Penicillin, a drug over 50 years old.
Pain relief? Aspirin - again nearly 100 years old.
Why isn't medicine evolving as quickly as, say, computing has over the last 100 years? What's holding it back? There are so many "syndromes" and untreatable things out there - why? I can't help feeling we should know and understand far more than we do. Anyone else have any thoughts?
What about his groove? Did he get his groove back, too?
-- dR.fuZZo
Dude, we're just PISSED because we've been waiting, what, like ten years for E17?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I really mean it, and you're better off reading it and skipping the glurge-ridden replies to his blog entry. One's right out of AA, which degenerates into some sort of e.e.cummings work that makes me wonder if the author fell off the wagon while typing it. Another respondent details how her husband beat necrotizing fasciitis with the power of positive thinking ... sigh.
I really do like to be happy for people's good news, really, but listening to the way some folks say it just gives me twitches.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
It never ceases to amaze me. If you didn't bother to read the article, I'll sum it up because I'm just awestruck: With a little creativity, his brain healed itself and created new pathways, almost spontaneously despite his age.
It's Scott Adams, not Andy Kaufman.
I don't see any reason why he would lie about it. It's just not his sense of humor.
...so that's why Loud Howard came back!
The most common technique for fixing people is medication, not surgery. Even surgery has come a very long way (such as minimally invasive techniques to reduce the actual cutting needed).
:). More human-friendly approaches don't often include penicillin these days due to resistance. You're more likely to get a more recently developed antibiotic like something in the amoxicillin family.
The most common technique for finding out what's happening inside someone are indeed x-rays, but advances in ultrasound and MRI technologies have reduced that need somewhat.
The most common method for curing bacterial infection is an autoclave
Pain relief? Lots of options, one of which is aspirin. Of course stretching the computer metaphor a bit, we're still using bits and bytes, so venerable methodologies aren't necessarily a bad thing.
Also consider the advances in immunization - rates of infection for things like polio, typhus, tuberculosis, rubella, and even varicella (chicken pox) are incredibly low in industrialized nations.
The field of medicine is moving at a pretty rapid pace. Is it on par with computing? Probably not, but I can't think of anything else off the top of my head that is, either.
I don't think it's ever going to be "released" as such... just keep up to date with current CVS. The guys are constantly experimenting with things and there's no target that I can see.
Yet in many ways medicine is still in the dark ages - there's so much we don't know or even begin to understand about the human body.
Why?
I know this is offtopic, but what the heck:
As a physician I feel qualified to respond. Care to lend parts of your body for experimentation? I can't promise you that you'll survive. I can't promise that you won't be disfigured. And I can't promise that you won't die from the consequences of some unforseen side-effect. No? I didn't think so somehow. We're bound by ethics to try things only when we're almost completely sure they will work and "do no harm".
I find it amusing how you can compare say coronary artery bypass grafting, or a laparoscopic hernia reduction, with Egyptians drilling holes in people's heads. They did it, yes. Now how many people survived the procedure?
As for the X rays and film, I believe I can introduce you to the CT scanner, a device now so affordable that most hospitals have several - even one _inside_ the ER. The film is still used for a hard copy, but it's printed by computer. Oh speaking of X-rays, I suggest you have a look at all the virtual endoscopy that's being done now, with 3-D modelling software. I can see inside your blood vessels without even touching your body. Let's not mention MRI's or PET scans shall we? No X-rays involved there at all. Quite a bit of progress since 1800. Radiology is one of the fields that is booming. Those radiologists are going to put us all out of work, I tell you.
The most common method for curing infections? Actually penicillin is hardly used nowadays, at least not at home. I invite you to look into penicillin derived synthetics such as the cephalosporins, aminopenicillins, ureidopenicillins. Then we have entire new classes of antibiotics, from macrolides to fluoroquinolones to aminoglucosides. Never heard of imipenem and meropenem? Most people haven't. How about vancomycin, or linezolid for that matter? I just named almost a dozen different families of antibiotics, each with different biochemical mechanisms.
Pain relief? Aspirin you say? What about all the non NSAID analgesics - metamizol, acetaminophen. Or all the other non-aspirin NSAIDs - diclofenac, ketoprophen, sulindac, indomethazine? Oh and for pain relief we can even talk about tramadol, or the use of anti-epileptic/anti-depressant medications like carbamazepine and floxetine. How about newer stuff, like Gaba-pentin? Then there's the opiods. We used to only have morphine. Now we have demerol, fentanyl, and a host of others....
Why isn't medicine evolving as quickly as, say, computing has over the last 100 years?
Just because you can't see the progress doesn't mean it's not there. Today we doctors must stay current more than ever. Some collegues estimate that almost everything we learn in medical school is obsolete within five years of graduation. And the pace is accelerating.
There are lots of diseases we still can't treat or cure, but now we understand why. The cure, however, is sometimes impossible due to the very nature of the disease. Many diseases are the manifestation of intracellular problems: abnormal gene expression, deficient receptors or intracellular messengers,etc. There's no way we can reach inside every single cell and fix what is wrong. So we make do with medications that block certain metabolic pathways or receptors, increase certain substances in the cells or body, or decrease others, to compensate for the defect.
Yet people still die. We run into new problems as we push back the average life expectancy. And society creates new ones. You had a far far greater chances of dying of a heart attack 50 years ago. Nowadays the survival is around 90% provided you make it to a hospital in the first hour. However people are having heart attacks at far younger ages due to the western sedenta
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I do think medicine isn't quite where it could be, but your statements are a bit off.
Most common technique for fixing people? A person with a sharp blade - a method most likely pioneered by the ancient Egyptians nearly 5000 yrs ago.
Depends on the type of fixing, but I would guess the laser is right up there with the scalpel for 'most common' due to all of the lasik surgery and other uses. Lasers are pretty modern.
Most common technique for finding out what's happening inside someone? Firing X-rays at a piece of film - a process pretty much unchanged since the late 1800's.
Most common due to price. These days we also have MRIs, CT Scans and even little cameras that can see inside of you.
Most common method for curing bacterial infection? Penicillin, a drug over 50 years old.
Can't argue with something that works. One of the improvements there are variants that can be used by people with allergic reactions to Penicillin.
Pain relief? Aspirin - again nearly 100 years old.
Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen are both widely used.
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many of the advanced imaging systems require that the object be dead or nonliving. Being able to move atoms doesn't mean we can move them outside the controlled field.
Also - the jump between the best optics can do and stuff like electron microscopes leaves a gap in what we can examine - which makes it tough to observe everything. I imagine that if they could slice Adam's brain into thing enough sections eventually they could map the neuronal pathways - but that wouldn't tell us what each one does and Mr. Adam's would also be unable to tell us what each one does - because his brain would be less than useful at that point.
CAT scans and fMRIs are much better than the process used in the past (forcing air up the spine and into the fluid areas of the brain case - then X-raying) but they still don't give us as much info as we can get and use in the realm of computers.
I don't think anyone listens to a comedian (cartoonist or other style) and immediatly believes him (or at least they shouldn't). But if you know his writing, this isn't it. Not even his most "serious" pieces are close to this. He always writes in some slight satirical style. This doesn't have a single joke, and for that it sounds like it's kosher. He's probably truthful about this. I can't imagine him trying to falsify this, it doesn't seem his style.
Probably the fact that we get to make up most of the rules in computing (catapults vs. cat's paws, etc).
Whereas medicine is essentially a constant process of reverse engineering and good old fashioned trial and error.
Hey, come to think of it, maybe computing and medicine aren't that different after all :-)
How is it inspirational? He didn't really do anything and it came back on a whim.
"Don't off yourself if you have Spasmodic Dysphonia, your voice might come back some day. Just keep up with your nursery rhymes and it's somehow possible that everything will be alright!"
I just saw this on an episode of House I was watching. Some guy lost his voice, house gave him botox and he could talk.
But... how?
Reminds me of the temporary paralysis of the vocal chords that singer Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors went through. I guess he could barely speak, and obviously couldn't sing, for a year or more.
That has to be such an aggravating afflication...though I would think a bit less for a comic strip author than for a singer.
to Dogbert. That damn mutt ruins more cartoons...
The average life-span here in the Netherlands is about 76. In 40 years it is estimated to be around 85/87. I don't think there is any point in history that comes even a bit close to that. Sure, some people grew very old, but those were the exceptions. A friend of mine is working on a cure for some heart deceases using gen-therapy. He's using a special strand of the influenca virus for distributing it into cells (if I got that correctly, I understand as much about those techniques as he does on cryptography:). It's not ready yet, but you can hardly compare that to cutting into bodies with a knife now, can you? Besides that, if a knife or aspirin works, well, what's the problem?
It might not be logically consistant with satire, but consider some of the best satirsts' pranks. Swift himself convinced the public of England that an amateur astonomer was dead; the astronomer was not and could not convince anyone that he wasn't more than someone who LOOKED like the supposedly dead astronomer.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Use Quickies. Approriate icon for this and thanks for replying!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
So wait... that means he's a girl?
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
When I visited my father(+) in hospital there was this girl of about 21/22 years old. She was just having a normal day when her brain "reversed". Apparently, the brain discovered that something was not going right, and decided to do a full reset. She simply collapsed. The good news was that it should be possible for her to get a full recovery. She was able to speak fine, and actually she was doing some work on her laptop while in hospital, but she had to relearn how to walk. That was her story anyway.
The brain sure can do strange things sometimes. I hope I never have to experience what she experienced, just collapsing out of the blue. I collapsed because of too low blood presure once, and that was scary enough.
Didn't House "cure" this in Season 1. I think it had to do with an insurance settlement or something some easy ass cure. Maybe Scott watched that episode.
It may be incurable but it's not unmanageable. see http://wamu.org/programs/dr/diane_rehm/
I'm confused. You are supposed to "Do no harm" yet you handed this guy his own ass with this comment? :)
Try rhyming ;o)
Wikileaks, no DNS
Reading his blog entry, I was suddenly confronted with the idea that either Scott Adams is a completely unique person (*), or he's stumbled onto a therapy which can apply to others.
:-P
Perhaps some doctors need to work with him and try to codify this a little and try to put it into practice. Something which nobody has ever been cured of, but which he managed to reason through and, well, remap his own damned neurons is something significant. I should think more than a few doctors would be trying to get this put into a case study.
I mean, trying to speak in foreign accents and all of the other things he did to fundamentally change the way his braing thinks about speech is amazing, both in its novelty and its apparent unique success.
Since it seems unlikely to be something completely unique to him, it definitely sounds like an avenue someone should be investigating.
(*) OK, I've been reading Dilbert for years, he's definitely a unique person.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I really don't feel that way about modern medicine, but dentistry on the other hand...
Along the lines of this:
f
http://burningman.com/sections/homepage/theman.gi
Several people were kind enough to point out some of the misconceptions in your post, including an actual physician, but from where I sit, they have *all* missed a key point.
The most common method of finding out what is going on inside the human body isn't an X-ray, CT scan, MRI or any of those highly technological machines. It seems to me the most common device for finding out what is going on in the human body is the simple stethoscope attached to the ears of a trained person.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Maybe the lesson is that a comic strip gets tired. When it gets in thrall to every vaugely tech/office based periodical it is only going to get narrower in scope and more formulaic. Much of Dilbert was (really) very(!) good, but the premise is limited.
Check out the "Dilbert Hole" for a new (but definitely not work-safe) spin on things though.
be correct. Sheez!
A powerful polemic! Thank you, doctor. Throughout the ages, there have always been those that have tried to understand the hows and the whys of disease and other symptoms. In modern times, the scientific principles have been the guiding path. Most medical and scientific people adhere to these principles. There have also been those that thought they could explain disease or other exemplars by invoking the unknown or some mystical aether that was untestable and unknowable. (Perhaps string theory belongs in this group.)
Now Mr. Adams you can TELL me where you have hidden the camera and microphone that you are using to spy on my office mates and me!
Dud, you missed them.
Anyone find it funny that one could talk about double entendres and not mention the phrase "talk with Taco"?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I have experienced similar language problems that originated in the brain rather than the vocal cords. Occasionally I get migraines. The first symptoms are visual -- a blind spot in the center of my vision that starts to fill with light and dark zigzags. If I don't take some aspirin quickly, then it progresses to language impairment.
In the language impairment stage, I begin to have trouble speaking my thoughts. I can think of what I want to say abstractly and my vocal abilities work fine, but I have difficulty coming up with the words I need. Listening to speech begins to feel like listening to a foreign language, just a jumble of sounds that doesn't seem familiar. At this point I usually go to a dark room and put on wordless music (classical or jazz). After a nap I'm mostly back to normal except I have a heightened awareness of how complicated language is.
The first time I experienced this language impairment it really scared me. I was trying to talk on the phone and felt very confused, like I had suffered a stroke. (I was in my mid 20's at the time.) Since I've learned that it's just part of a migraine for me and my language abilities will return, it's become an interesting study of mental function.
My mom and sister were around when I had one of these migraines and I had fun reading aloud to them as the language impairment hit. I would look at some text that was familiar, like the title of a book, and read how it appeared to me. It came out as some mixture of dyslexia and gibberish. It's interesting that both written and spoken language is affected. I'll have to test my ability to sing during the next episode.
AlpineR
Sounds like Opera Man!
I will save the research for those who aren't with it. Opera Man was a weekend update character played by Adam Sandler. He would appear in a fancy shirt and black cape and sing, opera style, jokes about current events and celebrities. Among Opera man's most notable sketches, regarding the L.A. Riots: "La Chiefa Policia, no dispatcha gendarme / morono, no respondo / no excusa, bagga doucha!"
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Diane Rehm, the NPR interviewer has this disorder and does 1-2 hours of show every weekday. scott is hardly the first to recover function, unless he means completely typical function (i couldn't decide which he meant after RTFA.)i hope for his sake it is a permanent, full recovery.
Well, as far as Sig's go, Freud was a doozy.
What's holding it back?
It's not so much what's "holding it back", since it's gone a long ways without you apparently, but more like "why aren't you getting this?" Libertarians will wave their hands and rant at the FDA, but in the simple fact is that the new technology costs more. If you fall and land on your arm are you going to have a $150 xray to make sure nothing broke, or a $3000 set of MRI scans along the arm? If you've got insurance, which one do you think the insurance company is going to pay for?
Thanks to the fact that just about everything is immune to penicillin now, it's almost never used, unless you're paying for it yourself and can't afford one of the newer antibiotics.
Aspirin and acetomenophen are cheap and popular, but the good ones are both expensive and controlled substances.
Aside from that, there is the whole "do no harm" thing that the doctor mentioned, it's generally unacceptable to use untested drugs and procedures on people (that damn FDA...) without some reviewed research that says "this might work and shouldn't kill you" or "this should work" or "this does work".
Still, entropy will win in the end, and we will all die sooner or later, no matter how advanced medicine has become.
Says you. Death's a mug's game. The only reason anybody dies is because everybody else is doing it, I say.
from this condition has happened before. One case was a woman also with Parkinsons. She suffered a period of amnesia and her voice came back for no apparent reason.
I got to see all kinds of similar improbabilities when I worked an NIDCD http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/
One of my favorites was bilingual people who'd had a stroke and lost one language but not the other. Completely mystifying.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
...and the supreme ruler of all heck has not been getting his fair share of the strip :P
Harm is an interesting term.
Allowing the original poster to go on his life in ignorance, using talking points he's heard from those who believe in god over science, that would be harm. Our dear doctor here has merely corrected his knowledge and allowed him to understand that he doesn't know everything in life, and sometimes the things people say are biased to support their causes.
I'm blogging about Scott Adams and Dilbert in http://nothing-about-everything.blogpost.com/searc h/label/dilbert
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
You're soooo right.
My sister is a medical student. For most of her seminars and classes she had to read from one to three articles in pubmed every week about very cutting edge research in the subject of the seminar.
I still remember when she told me that in one of her classes the teacher/doctor told the students that one of the former articles were not considered relevant anymore because of a new discovery. Because of that, I believe that medicine is probably the fastest evolving science and with reason, as human life is of primary importance.
Compared to, say, computer science, it advances much much faster. (with the growing of Java and C# instead of Lisp, I feel it has gone a little backwards.)
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Seems that laughter truly IS the best medicine!
We don't need a human interest icon. This is /.
And really, I have to say, I'm very happy to live in a society where my greatest risk to life and limb is eating myself to death.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
What's say we meet here again in a hundred years and see how your opinions have changed?
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Computers evolve quckly because we have no fear of the guess and check method of discovery.
Were I to try to debug my fancy new drug by testing it out on real humans to see what happened they would promptly lock me up and throw away the keys.
As a surgeon, I was actually pretty impressed with his skill at minimizing blood loss while performing a proctocephelectomy.
Some forms of spasmodic dysphonia are thought to be psychogenic so it could simply be recover from whatever issues he was having mentally that "cured" him. I really do not believe this to be unprecedented.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
Well, no. Not really. I *do* find it surprising that so many people would completely ignore the actual content of the post (Scott Adams no longer aflicted by Spasmodic Dysphonia--an extremely interesting story, imho), and instead rail on Keith Dawson for... his choice of a freaking icon.
Beyond that, your implication is that Keith not be very good of an editor. Tastes vary, of course, but I was a big fan of his TBTF newsletter, which ran from 1995 to 2003.
Perhaps he's new to slashcode, but he's an accomplished tech news editor/author. So, I'll let icon choices slide.
No, it really is hard to cook up a human.
(Not that I'm speaking from experience, mind you. Honest. Really.)
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
...for only eating vegetables!
How can we be sure he's not bullshitting us?
It is ironic that you say this, because he wrote an elaborate short essay about this topic. The first blog entry where he announced his malady was here:
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2
A quote:
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
And I'm not talking about that pussified Gandhi, I'm talking about the the real deal!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
You might find this interesting:
0 05/12/humor_formula.html
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2
"Recognizable situation" is only one out of six!
well thinking of hist strip most likely the garbage collector person.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
I have to agree with the GP. Medicine, in many ways, seems very primitive compared to other sciences. Despite it's tremendous importance and the amount of money we spend on research, progress seems very slow. The problem is that there is little consistent theory to tie together the ideas. Unlike physics or chemistry, which have depth, medicine looks very flat with lots of little discoveries that are not obviously connected. Perhaps that's just the nature of the beast, but it seems the human mind isn't good at comprehending all these little facts that interact in unobvious ways.
While it would speed up things to work with humans, medicine has always had animal models. While not identical to humans, they have much of the same cellular machinery that we still don't understand...
No doubt we have made progress, but there is so much that is still a mystery. A large part of medicine is still based primarily on experimentation. Create a bunch of chemicals and experiment to see if any have interesting properties. Take those and experiment with them on animals. If any of those work start experimenting on humans. Yes rational drug discovery is making some headway, but things still seem pretty primitive. Check out this article to see how many people are killed by modern medicine.
While these are nice technical achievements they don't directly lead to better understanding. Hopefully, the better images we get from these tools will lead to achieve better understanding and not just more empirical results. For example, the MRI research on brain function doesn't seem to be leading to a better understanding of how the brain works. However, maybe it's a important early step.
Well brawn (evolution) just might beat out brains. The number of drug resistant bacteria are increasing. Doesn't seem like a success story.
Chris Mesterharm
cephalosporins, aminopenicillins, ureidopenicillins. [...] from macrolides to fluoroquinolones to aminoglucosides. [...]imipenem and meropenem? [...] How about vancomycin, or linezolid for that matter? [...] metamizol, acetaminophen. [...] - diclofenac, ketoprophen, sulindac, indomethazine? [...] tramadol, [...] like carbamazepine and floxetine. [...] like Gaba-pentin? [...] Now we have demerol, fentanyl, and a host of others....
I read somewhere that Harvard Lampoon made a Tolkienesque story with heroes named after prescription drugs.
Ash nazg meropenem, ash nazg imipenem, ash nazg linezolid agh sulindac fentanyl!
Any idea how the language may affect this? A tonal language like Chinese has been shown to use different parts of the brain too. Perhaps someone who suffers from this disease would be able to speak Chinese perfectly, but then have problems with his voice when speaking English!
/MC
> Care to lend parts of your body for experimentation?
;)
... CT ... MRI
;)
;) There are still thousands of barely understood "syndromes" on the books, the causes of which appear to be pretty much in "here be dragons" territory, even today.
OK, that's a good point - experimentation on humans is tricky, there are days when I'd be tempted to offer my left foot to science if it stood a reasonable chance of a cure, but that's probably just the pain talking. However there are alternatives to human testing, like cell culture, other less ethically tidy options.
> We're bound by ethics to try things only when we're almost completely sure they will work and "do no harm".
Personally I feel there should be an Asimov-esque rider on that one. "No harm except where inaction will cause more harm". Harm comes in active and passive forms, and the passive form doesn't get the representation it should IMO.
> I find it amusing how you can compare say coronary artery bypass grafting, or a laparoscopic hernia reduction, with Egyptians drilling holes in people's heads. They did it, yes. Now how many people survived the procedure?
I did no such thing. There are some modern procedures that clearly require an amazing level of technical skill and understanding, although I'd be curious to see how many non-elective operations these days are the cutting edge ones, and how many are things we've been doing for ~100yrs or longer like the appendectomy? There are records of the ancient Egyptians lancing abscesses with knives - which is exactly the same treatment we use today. Archaelogical evidence suggests that some of those patients survived too
> As for the X rays and film
OK, and what's still the #1 diagnostic imaging technique, even in "developed" nations? X-ray and film. Can the newer techniques detect and diagnose all internal issues? No. We still can't effectively image many things - hence the need for exploratory surgery. Despite that much vaunted and often seriously expensive technology (MRI or PET anyone?) we're back to cutting people with knives again
> The most common method for curing infections? Actually penicillin is hardly used nowadays
That might illustrate a difference between our healthcare systems. Here in the UK Penicillin is still #1 or #2 in the prescription antibiotic charts. We are, alledgedly, a "developed" nation here.
> Pain relief? Aspirin you say? [snip long list of NSAIDs and others]
Yes, there are many newer painkillers out there. Yet how many are available over the counter, and what's the most commonly used painkiller, even in the US? Paracetamol/acetominophen? That's over 100 years old too.
> There are lots of diseases we still can't treat or cure, but now we understand why.
Do we really? So, we understand the exact reason why Scott Adams lost the ability to speak? Maybe you understand why my foot's swollen and painful - if so, perhaps you'd care to work here
> The cure, however, is sometimes impossible due to the very nature of the disease. Many diseases are the manifestation of intracellular problems: abnormal gene expression, deficient receptors or intracellular messengers,etc. There's no way we can reach inside every single cell and fix what is wrong. So we make do with medications that block certain metabolic pathways or receptors, increase certain substances in the cells or body, or decrease others, to compensate for the defect.
Actually, I think it should be possible to cure many/most of those eventually - the question is, how far off is it? Decades? Centuries? Wherever there's an anomaly it should be theoretically possible to develop something to recognise it and latch onto it, because by the very nature of it, it's in some ways different to the surrounding normal cells.
> Problems fixed, problems created. Still, entropy will win in the end, and we will all die sooner or later, no matter how advanced medicine has become.
On that final note I'm in 100% agreement!
From Scott's description, it sounds like this could be a manifestation of...
Oh, well, thank you, Doctor Law Poop.
I'm curious though. These days we can image individual atoms, and build things on a molecular scale. Yet in many ways medicine is still in the dark ages - there's so much we don't know or even begin to understand about the human body.
I know how to write 'Hello World'. That doesn't mean I can debug a process I don't understand, that is running on a server cluster for which I don't have a manual for, with the use of just an AM radio and a pencil.
now he can put it back in the sand where it belongs...
(his head, not his arse).
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
to a simple stone.
>There are lots of diseases we still can't treat or cure, but now we understand why. The >cure, however, is sometimes impossible due to the very nature of the disease. Many >diseases are the manifestation of intracellular problems: abnormal gene expression, >deficient receptors or intracellular messengers,etc. There's no way we can reach inside >every single cell and fix what is wrong. Let's dream of a device that can reach every single cell and fix what is wrong ! perhaps some neutrinos laser coupled to powerful software ! In a couple of centuries !
Yeah! Or maybe we could use transparent aluminium together with a dilithium core of parabolic bananas! In a couple of centuries!!
Mr. Adams said he sometimes came out with the completely wrong word when he tried to speak.
This sounds more like E. Henry Thripshaw's disease.
(As long as we're doing Python, might as well get the right fusebox.)
I don't use the "new discussion system" and I still get the "moderate" button. Maybe reverting back to the old system when you moderate would help. The new system is more annoying than useful anyway.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
...but has not lost his voice completely. If you've ever listened to Robert Kennedy Jr. speak it sounds as though he's always about to cry, like he's really struggling to speak.
Don't worry, as soon as we figure out the Unified Field Theory, supercomputers will solve all medical problems.
...is that he finally drew a mouth on himself!
mod me funny
Hope this helps.
Cheney/Bush '08
How many things about yourself could you change if you were sufficiently motivated?
It seems to me the techniques Adams used could be used for any kind of personal limitation you have, provided you are aware of it and want to change it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I wish Rush Limbaugh would lose his voice.
Software developer.
Hi Gang -
Is he really the first? Harvey Pekar of "American Spelndor" fame apparently lost his voice for about one year, and wrote a series of stories about it. (As I recall, it led directly the end of his marriage at the time.)
TWR
This type of condition is not fun to deal with. In my case, it locked my left vocal chord into a permanently "open" state, making speech nearly impossible. It was like unintentional whispering, but but you also quickly got out of breath while doing it.
Ultimately, it resulted in a having a highly invasive surgery that locked the vocal chord into the "closed" state. I can speak at a somewhat normal level now, but it's extremely raspy and causes me to go silent if I get too stressed. So yelling at someone is still impossible.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Actually, my brother also recovered from this after 6 months of having no voice -- so Scott Adams isn't the only one. The recovery process seemed similiar to the one described; it involved repeating the same phrases over and over while trying to speak them as well as possible.
(( (CRAYON) )) >
> > 2. a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.
> I think that were the poster's theory correct definition #2 would clearly apply.
So that means... getting a rare speech disfunction is "human folly?"
As a child I used to studder to the point of panic attacks yet when I sang I was okay. After having an excellent speech pathologist we figured out it was all in the breathing. Once I mastered proper breathing techniques I went on to perform in over 25 stage productions and competed nationally in competitive speech. You see, most people never learn to breath correctly let alone have proper breath control.
Singing forces you to control your breathing while regular speech does not. When you memorize something, like a prepared speech, you rehearse in where you are going to breath and it becomes programmed in. Being on the spot forces you into a panic response, adrenaline starts pumping, you start shaking a little bit, and you are affected by the 'nerves'. All techniques about staying calm are rooted in breathing properly. It's all about breath control. From personal experience I have to disagree with it being about using a different part of your brain.
The fact that we can even control our breathing is one of the reasons we can speak in the first place.
Nihilism means nothing to the dancing peasants
Quite a bit of progress since 1800
Yeah, but in 1800, there wasn't an HMO accountant telling my doctor not to perform certain tests or use certain equipment (like MRI's). I suffered with severe back pain (including missed work) for 12 months before my HMO coughed up an approval for an MRI. The doctors and scientists may be making progress in their knowledge - but they should clue the fucking HMO spreadsheet jockeys in.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
For years his mantra was that all illegal drug users should be in prison. If he did't have friends in high political places, a he would be; one of the perks of spewing their conservative bs, I guess.
Of Michael J. Fox's recent political commercial, Rush said that Michael was, "either off his medication or acting.", regarding Michael's body movements from the effects of Parkinsons. What an asshole.
Really. What are you on? Your post reads like one of those really annoying chain emails full of error ridden factoids that keep circulating because people think they are revealing some profound truth.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
While I agree that medecine is making great progress, I also believe that many of the progress are before we didn't know that we didn't know, now we know that we don't know, so it's not that helpful.
... on the other ear!
As for the scanner, sure they are great but one of my friend got a sound in one of his ear after diving, he did a scanner which found something suspicious
Funny, in about 2 weeks, you'll have an opportunity to personally contribute to making some headway on that front.
If someone who commits a felony is a felon, then somone who writes irony is an iron.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Very inspirational... I'm speechless.
uh-oh...
Well, that isn't the fault of the science, it is a funding/political issue. Maybe the USA should try moving from a "private" system to something a bit more like a "single payer" system? And while we are moving into the century of the fruit bat, maybe we can go metric?