Do you ever occasionally forget a name of a place or someone? You know it will come later to you, but at the moment, you frustratingly just can’t seem to recall. Now, imagine if this was a frequent occurrence, and instead of trying to remember someone’s name that you met years ago, it is a household object or a common item you use every day. This is a phenomenon called anomic aphasia, and it can happen to anyone recovering from a concussion or other traumatic brain injury (TBI).
What is Anomic Aphasia?
Aphasia is an umbrella term for any brain damage—whether through TBI or stroke—that causes language impairment. This can include the process or production of speech and affect reading comprehension and writing. People experiencing anomic aphasia can still speak, read, write, and understand language fluently, but they have trouble retrieving words. It is considered one of the milder aphasia diagnoses, as well as the most common.
When trying to understand anomic aphasia on a biological level, think of your brain like a highway with multiple roads leading to different destinations holding memories. At times when we want to remember or retrieve a word, our neurons send signals that travel through neural pathways or “roads” to retrieve the information at the correct memory destination. For those experiencing, anomic aphasia though, the road itself has been damaged or destroyed altogether. It is no longer possible to go and retrieve certain words.
One Patient’s Anomic Aphasia Story
At Mid-Atlantic Concussion Alliance, we frequently see patients who suffer from anomic aphasia after a concussion. They range in age from a high school athlete to a senior citizen. MAC Alliance Medical Director Vincent E. Schaller, MD, DABFM, CIC, shares a story of one patient who was experiencing anomic aphasia.
“I once had a patient who told me a story that after her car accident and concussion, she would be in the middle of a conversation and was suddenly unable to retrieve a word,” Dr. Schaller says. “She pulled up to a Wendy’s drive-through, ordered a meal for herself at the kiosk, then pulled up to pick up her meal at the second window. When she was handed the white bag with her hamburger and fries and then handed her beverage, she noticed something was missing. She turned to the attendant at the window and said, ‘Can I please have one of those…one of those…I don’t see it in my bag…you know one of those…one of those…’ She then pointed to her beverage and said, ‘One of those things you put in here…in this lid…’ The staffer finally caught on and asked, ‘You mean a straw?’ And the patient said with exacerbation ‘Yes! A straw.’ She drove away very upset and embarrassed.”
While a frustrating moment for this patient, after working with Dr. Schaller and doing Word Block Therapy for over three months as part of a customized post-concussion recovery plan, this same patient began to experience fewer occurrences where she struggled to retrieve the words she wanted to use.
What Is Word Block Therapy?
Word Block Therapy is a series of four-step exercises that the concussion specialists at MAC Alliance have patients do to remember certain words they have trouble retrieving. The steps for Word Block Therapy are as follows:
- Write the word down. Every time you face a word block, once you figure out the word, write it down, or type it into your cell phone’s note-taking app.
- Rewrite and recite the word. After work or a few hours after doing step 1, take out a blank piece of paper and write out the word 20 times. Say the word each time as you write it.
- Tell a silly story about the word. For example, for the patient who couldn’t recall the word “straw,” she told about how when she was younger, her little brother put a straw up each nostril and said, “Look, I am a walrus.” She then proceeded to write a story about her kid brother to associate with the word that was blocked for her.
- Illustrate the word. Next, draw a picture while telling the silly story that includes the word you blocked. If possible, draw a picture of the word or other objects or persons in the story. Stick figures are acceptable. Remember, the sillier the story, the more likely your will remember and retrieve the word going forward.
Patients are encouraged to make a “Word Block Journal” from an empty notebook to write these exercises down in. As more and more pages are filled out then the patient can see all the words they were blocking on and keep track if they struggle with the same word more than once. If they do, then they do the exercise again.
How Word Block Therapy Helps
Although simple and repetitive, Word Block Therapy is effective. Why? Because it is retraining your brain to familiarize words that were “lost” from the injury. The exercises are based on mnemonics, which are tools and tricks to improve your memory. Students are often taught mnemonics when learning new vocabulary and to assist studying for an exam that requires a lot of memory.
Essentially, the exercises build not the same, but new roads to the word retrieval destination for that word. Using visual, active, audio, and verbal skills will not only help create a new road, but will solidify it into the memory. This will make it easier when you need to retrieve that word the next time. Creating a story is a great memory device when wanting to remember a word because you can tie in memorable details throughout the story that will help you recall it.
Word Block Therapy does take time and diligent repetition (think of how long a road takes to build). We ask for patients to try this approach for three to six months. If there is no success after that time, a concussion provider can refer you to cognitive and speech therapy for further assistance. Overall, we see a strong success rate in our patients and are excited to incorporate Word Block Therapy into our concussion recovery toolbox.
Interested in learning more about Word Block Therapy or any of our other concussion therapies or tools? Contact us!
