La Petite Mort

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Re: Well written paper: Inducing "petit mort" in laboratory

From: LH
Date: 10/3/01
Time: 7:53:07 PM
Remote Name: 24.237.150.232

Comments

Thank you, Gunars. You ask some really interesting questions. I agree that it would be useful to capture petite mort on film, so to speak, using fMRI or some other brain imaging technique. If, as I suspect, the petite mort event is integral to some people's stuttering, it would be a matter of capturing, not inducing, the phenomenon. However, we aren't there yet technologically. The imaging techniques used nowadays are summative, or averages of several scans, not the fast snapshot I'd like to see. The temporal resolution is not good enough to really make definitive statements of what happens first or what happens later, which would be very useful. I'm sure that some day that will change, but we aren't there now.

As a matter of fact, I've wondered now and then if petite mort is the way people experience the unusual activity that appears in current brain-scan studies of stuttering. That is the merest speculation, though. I wouldn't want anyone to misquote me as making any kind of definitive statement on that point!

LH


Last changed: September 12, 2005