Every once in a while I unlock a new fear, usually of some rare disorder that would make life awful if I happened to contract it. I’ve made a post about focal dystonia before, but today I’ve got one that might make you writers quake in your boots. It’s called Wernicke’s aphasia, and I first heard about it in a high school neuroscience class from a teacher who was weirdly happy to scare us with awful brain disorders. The brain uses lots of interconnected areas to construct complex behaviors, and when only one of those individual parts is damaged the results can get really strange. One of those areas in the chain of language comprehension is called Wernicke’s area. When this area is damaged comprehension becomes next to impossible, but everything else about language, cadence, rhythm, motor control, and even social cues about when to speak, how loud, body language, and everything else is left unaffected. From across the room, someone with Wernicke’s aphasia would probably sound perfectly normal. In fact, many people with the disorder come off as perfectly kind people. Byron Peterson here seems like a nice person.

I think would be a lot crabbier if I were in his shoes. I can’t imagine the struggle of trying to write something with this kind of aphasia. I think I’ve actually had this problem in my nightmares, where I write something that sounds good in my head and yet I read back gibberish. It just makes me wonder how on Earth this squishy thing in my skull ever evolved in the first place if the slightest blood vessel going bust can do this to you.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley