Why do people who stutter, don’t stutter when singing?
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Musical ability comes from a different section of the brain than normal speech does. The stutter is an issue with the left side of the brain, not the entire brain.
An interesting little story:
If you’ve ever seen 50 first dates with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, you’ll remember she would forget everything she knew when she went to sleep, at least, all new memories she’d formed the day before.
This is a real thing that can happen. I took care of a young man who was in a horrible car accident. He cannot form new memories that last longer than when he goes to sleep. He had to carry a palm-pilot (yes, this was a while ago) on which he’d kept notes of the previous day, week, months activites, who I was, who other new people he’d met were. It was like he had to relearn his life over again, right up from the time of the accident. Imagine waking up thinking you have a 4 year old sister to find out she’s 12 now, overnight.
Anyhow, point of the story was, there were songs he could hear on the radio, play a few times and remember them the next day, even weeks later. Songs that came out after the accident. When my time was over with him, they were just beginning to figure out that they might be able to teach him new things by putting it in musical form. Fascinating stuff.
The simplest explanation is that singing uses different areas of the brain to speaking, tending to fire more in the creative hemispheres of the brain.
In addition songs are memorised, the lyrics known which helps in the same way preparing a speech can help reduce stuttering.
Source: various articles read on this due to own mild stutter.
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Anyone know the real cause of stuttering btw? Is it some sort of parental cutting off abuse or genetic ?
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Look up the 1970’s Canadian punk band “Electronic Vomit” I know the lead singer. He stutters even while singing
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I remember a celebrity in an overseas Asian country. I think she was a singer or something. She was famous, that’s all I remember. But anyway, she had a horrible stutter. But she was able to go to interviews and do award speeches without an issue. Her solution? She said she would act like a made up persona in her head. This persona had a different dialect than her own. And that purposeful change in speech allowed her focus on her wording and to speak without any stutter.
I know it’s not exactly what you asked, but might be valuable to the convo.
I forgot her name, I’ll have to look it up. Really interesting.
Stuttering/stammering occurs because of a mix of different reasons. Some of this is to do with speech (how our bodies say sounds when we talk). And some of this is to do with expressive language (how our brains put sentences together).
There are particular brain regions that are used to put a sentence together. We call the ‘journey’ of the sentence a pathway, or processing. People who stutter use a longer/less efficient pathway to put sentences together. This means that, while they might have very good language skills, there is more stress on the brain when they put a sentence together. Some people with language disorders also have a stutter, which comes about because it is very hard for them to put sentences together because they struggle to acquire grammatical rules or a wide vocabulary.
Stuttering is also linked to speech patterns. Controlling airflow, reducing tension in the face and throat, slowing speech down, and ‘gliding’ between words are all strategies people can use to have more control over their stutter.
When we sing, we use a different part of our brain, don’t have to process language (create sentences), and also control our airflow better. Putting this all together means that stuttering is much less likely.
I stutter. Most of stuttering is psychological and comes from the fear of not being able to say a word or sound. Then the physical fear response results in your muscles contracting a bit. The small part of stuttering that is physical is related to your diaphragm muscle locking up on you while breathing/exhaling as you speak, so that fear response results in your breathing locking up even worse, which results in no airflow, which then leads to stuttering.
When you sing, several things are different. You don’t have the fear of the social implications of stuttering. You’re also using different parts of your brain that aren’t wired for the same automatic fear response. You’re also usually using a different part of your diaphragm to breath which doesn’t have the physical blocking issue.
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