Article on Gabby Gifford's op-ed in today's NY Times

"And I don't buy the argument that her cognitive functions are unimpaired, not as a rebuttal to "Who really wrote it?". My grandmother was left in a condition much like Ms. Gifford's by a stroke. My grandmother's cognitive functions were sufficiently functional that she understood what we said to her. For her to try to express any sort of meaningful idea in words, either spoken or written, was quite another story. In fact, it never happened. She lived ten more years after the stroke, ten years that had to have been incredibly frustrating to her because my grandmother was a highly intelligent and well-educated woman who loved discussing history and philosophy. To see her sitting in her living room, unable to form ideas into words in any medium, was heart-breaking.

I don't believe for a single nanosecond that Gabby Giffords wrote that. I think her husband wrote it and she signed it."

Sorry about your grandmother.

But have you ever seen Stephen Hawking? The human brain is a mysterious thing. Injuries affect it different. You can't compare your grandmother to Giffords, way too simplistic. You don't even know that their brain injuries occurred in the same area. I have seen people completely lose the ability to speak from a stroke, but totally retain their cognitive abilities.
 
spaniel said:
But have you ever seen Stephen Hawking? The human brain is a mysterious thing. Injuries affect it different. You can't compare your grandmother to Giffords, way too simplistic. You don't even know that their brain injuries occurred in the same area. I have seen people completely lose the ability to speak from a stroke, but totally retain their cognitive abilities.

You realize that Hawking has ALS, which is a motor neuron disease?

A bullet traversing one hemisphere of the brain, from front to back, is going to pass through, and damage, a bunch of different areas.
 
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