Why do people who stutter, don’t stutter when singing?

Question

Why do people who stutter, don’t stutter when singing?

In: 411

Answer 1

Different parts of the brain are active when doing each of those tasks.

When you’re speaking, your brain is procedurally trying to conceptualize what you want to say, grabbing the words from memory required to say it, applying meaning to those words, anticipating what words, grammar, and tone should come next, as well as sending that information to the part of your brain that controls your speech, and then your mouth has to physically articulate the words you’re thinking. Often times you taking in other stimuli too, like maintaining eye contact, reading facial queues, being aware of your surroundings etc.

Quite often in people who stutter, the brain does this too fast. It charges ahead, but the actual output is too slow. This causes the “hitching” you often see in stutterers. Your brain realizes it’s fucked up, and is trying to recover a pattern of speech it’s already raced well ahead of to finish this thought. This makes the brain panic, and all the effort is suddenly taken away from forming the sentence, to then trying to recover the sentence, to just *trying to get a word out.*

Compare this with singing. You’re not procedurally coming up with speech, you’re recalling it. Memory is very good at storing patterns. And music is just one big pattern. So your brain isn’t parsing words into the “things to say” buffer too quickly for you to recite, it’s just parsing in this pattern. And you relay this pattern, which in music’s case *has words in it* so it seems similar to speech, but it could quite easily be just a tune. Ever sing along to music in the car, but you haven’t fully learned the lyrics of that song yet? That’s a great example of how the brain is good at storing the pattern, but the words and the instrumental are basically interchangeable parts of this pattern. Obviously we apply higher meaning to lyrics as we use words for other things, but your brain is just trying to match the pattern, and release serotonin when you recite the pattern correctly.