"Dilbert" Creator Gets Voice Back

Scott Adams lost his voice 18 months ago to a disorder called Spasmodic Dysphonia. One day, it returned. He is apparently the first person in history to recover from this malady. Read his account. It is inspirational. I can't find any other word for it.

ffs

Stop using the Enlightenment icon for unrelated stories, kdawson. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Re:ffs

Gah, beat me to it. Ah well, here's what I was going to post (slightly more polite):

KDawson, I just thought you'd like to know that the Enlightenment category is for the X11 Window Manager [enlightenment.org] by that name, and not "enlightening" topics. Unfortunately, Slashdot doesn't really have an "Inspirational" category. About the best you can do is "Entertainment" and "Links". Since this is the third time [slashdot.org] you've been in want of an inspirational category, you might consider talking with Taco about remedying the situation.

Re:ffs

Do none of you find any irony in the choosing of a double-entendre topic / icon and a condition like this???

Re:

Honestly, I thought that using the Enlightenment icon was totally ironic yet appropriate.

Sometimes, the nitpickers are just annoying -- just get over it and appreciate the irony dammit.

Re:ffs

I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition...

Re:ffs

I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition...

Sigh...nobody ever does...

Re:ffs

Nobody expects the inquisition. Especially not during the period of Spanish Enlightenment. Which makes for a really terrible pun.

You, my good sir, need to lay off the Monty Python. It's messing with your head.

Re:ffs

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.

Re:ffs

Is anyone else a bit surprised that a Slashdot editor didn't know that Enlightenment was a window manager, and even worse, used it incorrectly three times? After the first time, one of the other editors should have pointed it out to him, eh?

Re:Misplaced Criticism

I didn't ignore the content of the post. I read it and enjoyed it, then logged in to post about kdawson's ridiculous mistake.

Enlightened

Thanks, I changed this. There really is no perfectly appropriate topic for this story.

Re:Enlightened

If you really need an "enlightenment" icon, how about finding a simple Buddha image?

It's generic enough where pretty much everyone would catch on to the meaning.

Re:

So are you suggesting a fat buddha, which is actually a representation of someone else, or a skinny ass-kicking buddha in silks? Maybe we could depict him sparring with Kung'Fu Tse.

Re:Enlightened

Skinny-Ass-Kicking Buddhas can kill anyone they want! Skinny-Ass-Kicking Buddhas cut off heads ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. These guys are so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time. I heard that there was this Skinny-Ass-Kicking Buddha who was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon the Skinny-Ass-Kicking Buddha killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw a Skinny-Ass-Kicking Buddha totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window.

And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you don't believe that Skinny-Ass-Kicking Buddhas have REAL Ultimate Power you better get a life right now or they will chop your head off!!! It's an easy choice, if you ask me.

Skinny-Ass-Kicking Buddhas are sooooooooooo sweet that I want to crap my pants. I can't believe it sometimes, but I feel it inside my heart. These guys are totally awesome and that's a fact. Skinny-Ass-Kicking Buddhas are fast, smooth, cool, strong, powerful, and sweet. I can't wait to start yoga next year. I love Skinny-Ass-Kicking Buddhas with all of my body (including my pee pee).

Re:

Seriously, I've been reading slashdot for a couple of years (but not TFAs of course), and I didn't even know that there was an enlightment category, let alone not even recognizing the icon when I saw it. Though it should have been used on the "Yellow Dog

Elaborate ruse? Maybe not...

Fellow Dilbertites,

It seems the great overloard Adams was in fact inflicted by the great malady. [nih.gov] Rejoice at his miraculous recovery!

PS - I was quite confused at first as to the authenticity of this until I got goog-learned [google.com]. It seems it really does exist [emedicine.com], he very well may have had it [typepad.com], and if he recovered was indeed a miracle. However, it could also be an elaborate ruse, as I would expect from a satirist of his pedigree. :)

Re:Elaborate ruse? Maybe not...

satire - noun [reference.com]
1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.
2. a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.
3. a literary genre comprising such compositions.

In what way would pretending to have a rare illness and then pretending to be cured be satire? There is a difference between "lies" and "satire."

He recovered!

That leaves me speechless.

Sorry...

Re:He recovered!

[01:11] * Scott_Adams sets mode: +v Scott_Adams

+v mode for...

So wait... that means he's a girl?

I met a guy with that once

I met a guy with that condition once. Actually, I hired him to teach a course. Before I learned of his condition.

While teaching the course his voice was like a hoarse whisper. He characterised it as having "forgotten" how to speak. But while telling the class about his voice, he said he could sing. And suddenly as singing his voice was loud and strong.

I wished he did that for the whole course.

Re:I met a guy with that once

Know what's crazy? I can't talk properly either, yet when I sing, I am fine (despite singing badly).

There are a bunch of reasons that I've heard for this: that the words are longer so it's harder for me to mess them up, something about music and talking being in opposite hemispheres of the brain, and something about the singing voice being smoother or calmer than talking.

There was a story a while back about some girl getting a speaking aid where whatever she says is "echoed" into her ear, giving the impression that she's talking with someone else, which makes talking a lot easier. Yeah, here it is [bbc.co.uk].

Hooray to you, mr Adams. Us silent folk aren't all bad.

Spasmodic Dysphonia

Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has a nice article on Spasmodic Dysphonia.

As the blog indicates, this is thought to be a neurological condition. When I was studying AI as an undergrad, we learned a lot about neural networks [wikipedia.org]. This seems like the sort of thing that could happen if the brain's speech area's neurons somehow became trained to stop delivering impulses for "normal" speech. In this case, it would be theoretically possible to train the network back to normal levels. Of course, it could be something completely different.

Here's wishing Scott the best.

There's a problem though

The actual relationship between AI neural networks and the brain is really weak. From the wiki article:

Neural networks, as used in artificial intelligence, have traditionally been viewed as simplified models of neural processing in the brain, even thoug

Re:There's a problem though

Ok, but if we put it like this: a general multi-layer perceptron, which is often what "neural network" means in practice in an AI context, is quite dissimilar to a real neural network. You can't even get a feedback! (Which is kind of logical, since a MLP generally doesn't model time per se.) Back-propagation training is also quite different from the self-promoting mechanisms that are now believed to be significant for selection of neural connections.

There are some similarities, and it's certainly possible to model biological neurons and systems in a machine. Those models will bear some similarities to neural networks used in classifying tasks, but there are also similarities to a whole range of (other) graph problems. It's kind of like the relation between ray-tracing and triangle/Z-buffer based rendering. The latter is a way to approximate the former, sort of. They have some similarities, and programmable hardware that's good for doing the latter might be tweaked to do the former as well, but you don't get a raytracer just by cranking up the polygon count, as the whole strength of the normal rendering paradigm is based on greatly simplifying assumptions that are centered on Getting Stuff Done.

scott adams

Mr Adams is extremely good at thinking creatively at problems. In the back of one of his books ( i can't remember which ) he talks about his experimentation with affirmations. It was extremely interesting to read about his testing and just the way he thinks. I envy his ability to reason through and logically deciefer things he doesn't initially understand.
 
Nice to hear you got your voice back.. now get back to drawing funny stuff!
 

Re:

The most important fact about that affirmations chapter is that 98% of readers probably never tried it, because it just sounds "wacko" or "supersitious". Especially when he claims to have used it for things he cannot influence subconsciously accodring to a

Singing vs. Talking

I've been fascinated with speech conditions, primarily because of the nature of how people end up compensating and communicating. It's definitely related to something neurological, because scientists have shown that, for example, you use different parts of your brain when you speak personally vs when you sing. I've also seen people who, when they act on stage or in screen, speak in perfect diction, tone, and with great command, but if asked to improvise or speak informally, they say umm a lot and/or seem very nervous. A prepared speech in front of many people would often work, neurologically, the same way as an acting or singing performance.

I wish Scott Adams the best. He's one of the gods in the geek pantheon, and it would be sad for him to suffer so when he brings joy to so many of us.

"A cat?" "No, a bat."

Reminds me of a Monty Python sketch where one of the characters was unable to say the letter "c" because of a trauma he had suffered as a sbhoolboy, so he used "b" instead. Midway through the sketch, it was pointed out to him that he could talk normally if he instead used "k" for "c".

Re:

And that is how the KDE applikation namer kame to be.

Re:"A cat?" "No, a bat."

Wait, you're saying KDE is just CDE for people who can't pronounce the letter "c"?

Let's rename the condition

In honor of this situation, I say we rename the disease to Dilbert's Syndrome. Note how Dilbert has no mouth? Think about it :)

You think this is callous? Far from it! Again we name it this way in order to honor the first person who kicked it. And I think Scott would enjoy the irony of having a neurological disease named after one of his characters. Scott Adams is all about Irony ;)

It's off topic!

Read his account. It is inspirational. I can't find any other word for it.

Enlightening, perhaps?

Speaking of Scott Adams...

I recently stumbled across his book God's Debris (Free PDF file) at http://images.ucomics.com/images/pdfs/sadams/godsd ebris.pdf [ucomics.com]. I'm not real a big fan of Dilbert and only read a handful of the comics but this book is very interesting.

You know what this means

The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme

So will his next career move be to a rapping Scott Adams? Or a Dr. Seuss Adams?

Tension Myosis Syndrome

From Scott's description, it sounds like this could be a manifestation of Tension Myositis Syndrome [wikipedia.org]. TMS is a diagnosis developed by Dr. John Sarno that describes persistent headache, back and muscle pain that is not explained by injury and is resistant to treatment as caused by blocking painful emotion. The brain creates a distraction of physical pain by robbing muscles of oxygen so that the person doesn't have to deal with difficult or socially unacceptable emotions (resentment at the needs of a newborn, stress of a new job, caring for aging parents, etc).

Here are two facts that align with TMS:

• it doesn't have a well-described physical mechanism -- i.e. doctor's don't understand specifically the physical mechanism of the diease
• the fact that it is a phenomena of the muscles align with other TMS diagnoses -- in this case paralysation instead of oxygen deprivation.

Now before any of you claim that the two are mutually contradictory, understand this: the doctors don't have any explanation for *why* Scott's muscles are paralysed. They just are. They have no reason or cause not to be working; they just don't. There is no diease, such as injury, bacteria, virus, or anything that would have paralysed these otherwise working muscles. They just aren't working. But, the person can sing.

The fact that Scott was able to work his way out of it through self-hypnosis, visualization, and practice, seems to indicate that it was something in the mind. Sarno's course of treatment for TMS includes such activities. He also recommends psychotherapy for dealing with emotions.

In fact, in Sarno's recent book _The Divided Mind_, he recounts a story about a famous turn-of-the-century hypnotist who was able to cure a person's muteness, while they were under hypnosis.

I'm not in favor of going to herbs and drumming for medicine. But it seems to me that emotional issues causing physical problems are an unexplored and undertreated area of modern American medicine.

Loud Howard?

Does this have anything to do with the return of Loud Howard? [dilbert.com] (I wonder?)

I suffered a similar problem

Mine was of a much more temporary nature but still frightening.

I had been playing basketball at the gym one evening and took a good elbow to the head down in the post that put me on the floor. Hurt, but didn't knock me out or anything. I got up and continued playing the rest of the game. I didn't think much of it at the time. I went home, grabbed a shower and headed for bed. I was single at the time so I didn't chat with anyone at home.

The next day I got up, felt fine, went to work. Someone came over to ask me a question and as I responded, the words were just a jumble. I couldn't pronounce anything. Sounded like I was just mumbling some unintelligible garbage.

My vocal cords were fine. I could make sounds. I could understand people. I could write responses on paper. I just couldn't form words. I headed to the ER.

Anyhow there was nothing they could do for me. The scans showed no dangerous swelling that needed immediate attention, but obviously something had been short circuited in my speech center. I took me a good month+ to get back to where I could speak more or less fluidly again.

For me, it wasn't a "one day I could talk again" sort of thing. I had to work at it every day. I'd practice speaking in the mirror. I could speak very very slowly if I concentrated on each sound I wanted to make.

Anyhow I just wanted to convey some sympathy towards Scott Adams' situation.

Other neurological disorders

Seems like Adams also suffers from focal dystonia, "Adams was diagnosed with the condition -- a neurological movement disorder, marked by involuntary muscle spasms--back in 1992...The problem affects his right hand -- the one he uses to draw."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/05/09/AR2005050901066.html [washingtonpost.com]

What an inspirational story

I really mean it, and you're better off reading it and skipping the glurge-ridden replies to his blog entry. One's right out of AA, which degenerates into some sort of e.e.cummings work that makes me wonder if the author fell off the wagon while typing it. Another respondent details how her husband beat necrotizing fasciitis with the power of positive thinking ... sigh.

I really do like to be happy for people's good news, really, but listening to the way some folks say it just gives me twitches.

Brain reset

When I visited my father(+) in hospital there was this girl of about 21/22 years old. She was just having a normal day when her brain "reversed". Apparently, the brain discovered that something was not going right, and decided to do a full reset. She simply collapsed. The good news was that it should be possible for her to get a full recovery. She was able to speak fine, and actually she was doing some work on her laptop while in hospital, but she had to relearn how to walk. That was her story anyway.

The brain sure can do strange things sometimes. I hope I never have to experience what she experienced, just collapsing out of the blue. I collapsed because of too low blood presure once, and that was scary enough.

Diane Rehm has struggled for years with this

It may be incurable but it's not unmanageable. see http://wamu.org/programs/dr/diane_rehm/ [wamu.org]

Therapy for anyone else??

Reading his blog entry, I was suddenly confronted with the idea that either Scott Adams is a completely unique person (*), or he's stumbled onto a therapy which can apply to others.

Perhaps some doctors need to work with him and try to codify this a little and try to put it into practice. Something which nobody has ever been cured of, but which he managed to reason through and, well, remap his own damned neurons is something significant. I should think more than a few doctors would be trying to get this put into a case study.

I mean, trying to speak in foreign accents and all of the other things he did to fundamentally change the way his braing thinks about speech is amazing, both in its novelty and its apparent unique success.

Since it seems unlikely to be something completely unique to him, it definitely sounds like an avenue someone should be investigating.

(*) OK, I've been reading Dilbert for years, he's definitely a unique person. :-P

Re:What does this have to do with Enlightenment?

I swear if I were him I'd keep using the Enlightenment icon for stories of inspiration just for the near-violent reaction it gets. No offense, but you're all rather uptight in an amusing sort of way.

Re:Dilbert is a one-trick pony

I think you missed the point - the boneheaded stuff is in Dilbert *because* it occurs in your office. How many dilbert cartoons have you read, and thought - he's been round here looking through the windows!

Its basically observational comedy - standups do it all the time, and it works. Find something that people recognise and emphasise the parts of it that are dysfunctional. I suppose we laugh about it because we'd cry otherwise :-)

Kitten/Pony Icon for Human Interest

Why? Because some of us are actually interested in Enlightenment's development and upcoming release. As it is this is something very much like bait and switch. I see the icon, and get a craptasic story instead of something related to E. Is it so fucking hard to cook up a human interest icon? Maybe a fluffy kitten, or a pink pony?

This is a great idea, and I don't know why you were modded to zero. We need a human-interest type of category. I suggest a kitten crossed with a pony, like the skull and crossbones. I for one, welcome our new kitten/pony icon/category overlords!

Re:Isn't it fascinating that we still know so litt

Yet in many ways medicine is still in the dark ages - there's so much we don't know or even begin to understand about the human body.

Why?

I know this is offtopic, but what the heck:

As a physician I feel qualified to respond. Care to lend parts of your body for experimentation? I can't promise you that you'll survive. I can't promise that you won't be disfigured. And I can't promise that you won't die from the consequences of some unforseen side-effect. No? I didn't think so somehow. We're bound by ethics to try things only when we're almost completely sure they will work and "do no harm".
I find it amusing how you can compare say coronary artery bypass grafting, or a laparoscopic hernia reduction, with Egyptians drilling holes in people's heads. They did it, yes. Now how many people survived the procedure?
As for the X rays and film, I believe I can introduce you to the CT scanner, a device now so affordable that most hospitals have several - even one _inside_ the ER. The film is still used for a hard copy, but it's printed by computer. Oh speaking of X-rays, I suggest you have a look at all the virtual endoscopy that's being done now, with 3-D modelling software. I can see inside your blood vessels without even touching your body. Let's not mention MRI's or PET scans shall we? No X-rays involved there at all. Quite a bit of progress since 1800. Radiology is one of the fields that is booming. Those radiologists are going to put us all out of work, I tell you.
The most common method for curing infections? Actually penicillin is hardly used nowadays, at least not at home. I invite you to look into penicillin derived synthetics such as the cephalosporins, aminopenicillins, ureidopenicillins. Then we have entire new classes of antibiotics, from macrolides to fluoroquinolones to aminoglucosides. Never heard of imipenem and meropenem? Most people haven't. How about vancomycin, or linezolid for that matter? I just named almost a dozen different families of antibiotics, each with different biochemical mechanisms.
Pain relief? Aspirin you say? What about all the non NSAID analgesics - metamizol, acetaminophen. Or all the other non-aspirin NSAIDs - diclofenac, ketoprophen, sulindac, indomethazine? Oh and for pain relief we can even talk about tramadol, or the use of anti-epileptic/anti-depressant medications like carbamazepine and floxetine. How about newer stuff, like Gaba-pentin? Then there's the opiods. We used to only have morphine. Now we have demerol, fentanyl, and a host of others....
Why isn't medicine evolving as quickly as, say, computing has over the last 100 years?
Just because you can't see the progress doesn't mean it's not there. Today we doctors must stay current more than ever. Some collegues estimate that almost everything we learn in medical school is obsolete within five years of graduation. And the pace is accelerating.
There are lots of diseases we still can't treat or cure, but now we understand why. The cure, however, is sometimes impossible due to the very nature of the disease. Many diseases are the manifestation of intracellular problems: abnormal gene expression, deficient receptors or intracellular messengers,etc. There's no way we can reach inside every single cell and fix what is wrong. So we make do with medications that block certain metabolic pathways or receptors, increase certain substances in the cells or body, or decrease others, to compensate for the defect.
Yet people still die. We run into new problems as we push back the average life expectancy. And society creates new ones. You had a far far greater chances of dying of a heart attack 50 years ago. Nowadays the survival is around 90% provided you make it to a hospital in the first hour. However people are having heart attacks at far younger ages due to the western sedenta

Re:Isn't it fascinating that we still know so litt

I'm confused. You are supposed to "Do no harm" yet you handed this guy his own ass with this comment? :)

Re:Isn't it fascinating that we still know so litt

Harm is an interesting term.

Allowing the original poster to go on his life in ignorance, using talking points he's heard from those who believe in god over science, that would be harm. Our dear doctor here has merely corrected his knowledge and allowed him to understand that he doesn't know everything in life, and sometimes the things people say are biased to support their causes.

Re:Isn't it fascinating that we still know so litt

As a surgeon, I was actually pretty impressed with his skill at minimizing blood loss while performing a proctocephelectomy.