Where Have All the Aphasics Gone?
New York\ Cesar Chelala Illustration by Paola Bilancieri
The kingdom called LaLa Land is located among the Carpathian Mountains. It is ruled by a temperamental emperor whom many of his vassals call The Master Manipulator or, in short, M.M. He issues executive orders with the speed that a jazz musician spits, and has managed to antagonize almost half of the population of his kingdom.
The citizens of LaLa Land have the same proportion of many diseases as other countries, with one notable exception. Those afflicted with aphasia comprise almost half of the population.
Aphasia is a language disorder that results from damage to areas of the brain responsible for language. This disorder hinders several aspects of language, and anyone can acquire it. It seriously affects communication among people. Now, with new technologies, aphasia can be vastly improved and its damaging effects considerably lessened.
There is a kind of aphasia called Aphasia floriloquens. In his bookThe Afflictions,Dr.Vikram Paralkar describes its characteristics. Acknowledging that Aphasia floriloquens is difficult to place among the ninety-two categories of linguistic derangements known to man, Paralkar says that it is the only aphasia characterized by an extraordinary excess of speech, rather than a lack of it.
Lets see what Paralkar says about those affected by the disorder, These invalids are often exploited. The curious persuade them to give public lectures, which are like the traveling carnivals that display men with bodily deformities. Their lectures are immensely popular. The invalid with Aphasia floriloquens stands on a stage spluttering, vainly struggling to answer the simple questions posed to him, while hundreds of learned men sit alert with their quills and papers, hoping to extract a few brilliant juxtapositions from the web of arcane tangents. Many disgruntled vassals believe the king of LaLa Land is affected by this condition.
Although aphasia affects middle-aged or older people, anyone can acquire it, even young children. The current estimate of aphasics in the United States one million Almost 180,000 Americans acquire it each year, according to the National Aphasia Association.
Despite the burden it poses on the afflicted by it, common aphasia has a notable characteristic. In his book The Man who Mistook his Wife for the British-American neurologist Oliver Sacks described people with the severest form of global aphasia. Although they are unable to understand words, they nonetheless understand most of what is said to them. As Dr. Sacks wrote,Thus the feeling I have –which all of us who work closely with aphasics have- that one cannot lie to an aphasic. He cannot grasp your words, and so he cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily.
According to Sacks, aphasics have a unique talent to recognize a falsehood, or malice, or misleading intentions. They can also tell us who can be trusted, who has integrity, who makes sense, when we so aware of the power of wordscannot rely in our own instincts.
Sacks writes of an occasion when laughter was heard from the aphasia ward, while patients eagerly listened to a presidential speech. There he was, the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practiced rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal --and all patients were convulsed with laughter. Well, not all: some looked bewildered, some looked outraged, one or two looked apprehensive, but most looked amused. The president was, as always, moving “but he was moving them, apparently, mainly to laughter. What could they be thinking? Were they failing to understand him? Or did they, perhaps, understand him all too well?
Which brings me back to the situation in LaLa Land, where the king assumed unheard of powers, which he uses to persecute his enemies, dismantle the kingdom, eliminate all controls, and reward blind loyalty. And I ask: Where have all the aphasics gone, the ones who can tell that the emperor has no clothes?
Dr. Cesar Chelala, an international public health consultant and writer, is the winner of several journalism awards. |
