The disorders of speech.

  • Wyllie, John, 1914-
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The disorders of speech. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    local memory and possessions of the mind, which can be afterwards revived and made use of. Thev are fixed or burnt in at the first, as afterwards they can be revived and refreshed, by the light and heat of the Attention. Within each entrance gateway for incoming impressions, there are thus amassed, by this process of educative attention, myriads of sensory images of all kinds. Within each exit or motor gate- way, in like manner, there are amassed, by efforts of the attention, the motor memories of finely associated movements. That these various memories of reception and production are linked together into the groups which go to form our primary ideas of objects and of words, we have already seen. Now, clearly, such an exercise of concentrated attention is particularly necessary for the education of the sensory and motor centres concerned with the reception and production of speech. The sounds of speech that have to be distinguished and registered are particularly delicate and complex ; and so also are the muscular acts necessary for its production. If it is sufficient for the purposes of speech that these delicately complex memories of reception and production be impressed upon one side of the brain only, clearly it will be a great saving of nervous energy to train one hemisphere only, rather than to train both. This, in fact, is evidently the explanation of the apparent anomaly that the two symmetrical hemispheres should, in so far as this particular function is concerned, be so markedly asymmetrical in physiological capacity. It was the late Dr Moxon who first suggested such an explanation. In a short but remarkable paper,1 published in 1866, he discusses the operation of the attention in the education of the brain to speech, and to other forms of finely coordinated action. Taking piano-playing as one of his illustrations, he points out that it is comparatively easy for a beginner to play in unison on different octaves with the two hands. This seems to require only one attention for the two hands, that attention being directed to the motor centre for the right hand, which in all probability is made not only to innervate the muscles of the right hand, but also to uide the centre for the left hand. To train the centre in the one 1 British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review^ 18G6, p. 481.