"The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain"
by
Alice W. Flaherty
The neurologist Oiver Sacks tells of a ward of aphasic patients listening to President Reagan give a speech on television. Although unable to fully understand his words, the patients compensated by being particularly sensitive to his tone and inflections, which they found farcical. A patient with a right hemisphere lesion who could not judge tone was also present. She concentrated on Reagan's exact words--which she too found ridiculous. Sacks concluded from this that it takes a fully working brain to be deluded by politicians. Nancy Etkoff and her colleagues confirmed Sacks's anecdote experimentally by showing that in a controlled setting aphasics had better lie-detection ability than undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lest anyone object that MIT students do not count as completely normal controls, she also had a smaller group of more typical control subjects.
The Midnight Disease, p. 161
Posted by Hannah at January 30, 2005 02:42 PM