Science: Heads Down

No matter how calm he may appear, when a stutterer has difficulty getting a word out he is really suffering from a spasm. The spasm is a disturbance of the motor nerves that control speech. It may possibly be set off by expansion of the tiny blood vessels in the cerebral cortex where the speech control centres are located. Last summer experimenters at University of Michigan's laboratory of biolinguistics made 24 stutterers get down on their hands & knees, talk while crawling. In every case the stuttering was notably diminished, in some cases...

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