Saturday, April 24, 2010

Saul Bellow Writes a Love Letter, and Considers Heaven

I’ve become forgetful, too. Nothing like your father’s nominal aphasia. I find I can’t remember the names of people I don’t care for—in some ways a pleasant disability. I further discover that I would remember people’s names because it relieved me from any need to think about them. Their names were enough. Like telling heads. NEXT....

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Ottawa artist recognized for work with aphasia sufferers

Until he started volunteering at the Aphasia Centre of Ottawa two years ago, Jeffrey Burns had no idea how much he had in common with people suffering from aphasia, a disturbance in processing or understanding language due to brain damage, often from a stroke.

But the Ottawa artist quickly discovered that, like him, people with aphasia often rely on a visual language to express themselves. Instead of speaking, reading or writing, they count on pictures to do the talking for them. “I value images very much, as well as the written word and the poetics of language, so I really understand how frustrating it must be to have difficulty with those things,” said Burns.

Fluent Aphasia (Wernicke Aphasia) Symptoms


This form of aphasia is caused due to damage to the middle left region of the brain, where the language network exists. It is called fluent aphasia because people suffering from this form of speech disorder have the ability to speak long, complex sentences fluently, however, these sentences often make no logical sense and are strings of inappropriately used or unrecognizable words. They cannot understand what others are saying properly and fail to see that others cannot understand what they are trying to say.Next...