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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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"
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.
"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?)
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.
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
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?
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.
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 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 :-)
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.
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? :)
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.
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
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.
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
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.
As a surgeon, I was actually pretty impressed with his skill at minimizing blood loss while performing a proctocephelectomy.
I didn't ignore the content of the post. I read it and enjoyed it, then logged in to post about kdawson's ridiculous mistake.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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