Was Ronald Reagan unique among politicians in his ability to fool people with normal brains, but not so much those with brain damage? It would be interesting to test that. – Ilene
Courtesy of Paul Slansky at Dangerous Minds
In his 1986 New York Times best-seller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, an examination of various bizarre neurological disorders, Oliver Sacks provided an account of oppositely impaired patients – aphasiacs, who can’t understand spoken words but do take in information from extra-verbal cues, and tonal agnosiacs, who understand the actual words but miss their emotional content – watching a speech by President Reagan.
“It was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice,” wrote Sacks, which caused the word-deaf aphasiacs to laugh hysterically at the Great Communicator, while one agnosiac, relying entirely on the actual words, sat in stony silence, concluding that “he is not cogent … his word-use is improper” and suspecting that “he has something to conceal.”
“Here then,” wrote Sacks, “was the paradox of the President’s speech. We normals – aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled … And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived.”
Excerpted from the “Reagan Centennial Edition” of my 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor, available here as an enhanced eBook.
