Heads Down

No matter how calm he may appear, when a stutterer has difficulty getting a word out he is really suffering from a spasm. The spasm is a disturbance of the motor nerves that control speech. It may possibly be set off by expansion of the tiny blood vessels in the cerebral cortex where the speech control centres are located. Last summer experimenters at University of Michigan's laboratory of biolinguistics made 24 stutterers get down on their hands & knees, talk while crawling. In every case the stuttering was notably diminished, in some cases eliminated entirely--so long as the crawling posture was maintained. Reporting this last week in Science, Experimenter Hazle Geniesse ventured a guess that such a posture might alter the cerebral blood pressure, remove the spasmodic stimulus. P: Dr. Donald Anderson Laird, Colgate's well-publicized authority on sleep, also had a report to make last week on the effect of posture on blood distribution. Dr. Laird thought that, although mankind was benefited by acquiring the upright position, there were some disadvantages. In erect man the blood tends to collect in the abdominal pool, which may cause a slight blood deficiency in the brain. Dr. Laird tested, for proficiency in mental arithmetic, six students with their heads a foot lower than their feet. In this position they were 14% more accurate, 7% faster than they were with their heads one foot higher than their feet, presumably because of blood coursing by gravity from the abdominal pool toward the brain. Dr. Laird holds it not impossible that man may once again assume the quadrupedal position, in order to think better.

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