For those with pure word deafness, actions always speak louder than words

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For those with pure word deafness, actions always speak louder than words

The phone rings — you hear it. The caller ID displays — you read it. You pick up the phone — you say hello. But no matter how hard you listen, you can’t understand a single word that’s said either by you or the caller. 

No, you haven't just crossed over into the Twilight Zone; you have a rare syndrome called pure word deafness (PWD). Individuals with PWD cannot understand any speech, even if they can identify other sounds and read written words with no difficulty whatsoever

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Remembering neuroscientist Allison Doupe

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Each week SINTN (the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neuroscience) invites a prominent scientist to come to campus and share their most recent work with the Stanford community. For professors, and a few students each week, this is also an opportunity to chat casually with these scientists one-on-one. Our goal with this program is to open that experience up to the broader neuroscience community. We hope the conversation gives you some insight into the speaker’s personality and provides a platform for the kind of stories of science which are of interest to us but are often are left out of more formal papers or presentations... how did the scientist really get interested in a subject ? what are some of the more unexpected challenges they had to overcome? In essence, it’s a conversation between neuroscientists, for neuroscientists. This week’s speaker is Alison Doupe, a professor of psychiatry and physiology at the W.M. Keck Foundation Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF.

This past Friday, the neuroscience community suffered a great loss with the passing of Allison Doupe, a professor of neuroscience at UCSF. Professor Doupe was our very first guest on the Neurotalk podcast, which I wanted to repost here as a small way of remembering and appreciating her life and contributions to science. You can also find a short write-up about Professor Doupe here: In Memoriam: Allison Doupe. 

 

 

Ask a Neuroscientist: Spoken versus Written Language

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Ask a Neuroscientist: Spoken versus Written Language

n this edition of Ask a Neuroscientist, I crowdsource the answer to a question about the differences between how the brain processes spoken versus written language.  

The question comes from Minski, who wrote:

"Does writing down what I think and saying what I think activate different parts of the brain and neuropathways?  I feel I have an easier time writing than I do speaking, so I wonder.  

Thank you for your time and knowledge!"

 

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