The Science of Game of Thrones: Did Hodor suffer from aphasia?

Hodor. Hodor? Hodor!

 

Thanks to the popularity of “Game of Thrones”, “Hodor” has arguably become one of the most recognizable nonsense words in recent pop culture history.

 

It is in the pages of George R. R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” epic that we first meet Hodor, a simple-minded, 7-foot tall stableboy serving the Starks at Winterfell. Though “Hodor” isn’t his real name (it’s Walder), we soon find out why everyone has taken to calling him exactly that. Hodor, as you probably already know, can only speak a single word – “Hodor”.

 

 

A passage from one of the books sums it up best:

 

“Theon Greyjoy had once commented that Hodor did not know much, but no one could doubt that he knew his name. Old Nan had cackled like a hen when Bran told her that, and confessed that Hodor’s real name was Walder. No one knew where ‘Hodor’ had come from, she said, but when he started saying it, they started calling him by it. It was the only word he had.”

 

As is also evinced by this passage, Hodor is not the complete idiot that some people seem to think he is. Despite his limited vocabulary, he is capable of understanding spoken language and following orders; he has the capacity to make decisions and aid those in need of assistance; he can even express his emotions by varying the intonation of his favorite word.

 

The character of Hodor remains a fabrication, a product of pure fantasy—but his condition is far from made-up.

 

Hodor, Tan, and a 19th-century French physician

 

Speech is made possible by an intricate network of neurons in the brain; when the part of the brain responsible for speech is damaged, this ability is impaired, sometimes drastically.

 

So what is going on in Hodor’s brain?

 

According to neuroscientist Indre Viskontas, Hodor’s restricted verbal communication, in conjunction with his above average language comprehension, is a presentation of a neurological condition called expressive aphasia. This normally involves a localized stroke that damages the front and left side of the brain, but other causes include a blow to the head, or a tumor.

 

Hodor’s case is actually rather severe, but there are real life precedents that exhibit just how traumatic brain injury can significantly affect our powers of speech.

Broca's discovery
 

Expressive aphasia was first described medically over 150 years ago. The other name for this disorder is Broca’s aphasia, after French anatomist, surgeon, and anthropologist Pierre Paul Broca.

 

Broca was partly responsible for the foundation of modern neuroscience in the 1860s. In 1861, he met a couple of patients who were suffering from extreme speech deficit.

 

The first patient was a 51-year-old man named Leborgne. Like Hodor, he could only utter one word, and eventually came to be known by that word – “Tan”.

 

“He could no longer produce but a single syllable, which he usually repeated twice in succession; regardless of the question asked him, he always responded: tan, tan, combined with varied expressive gestures,” Broca wrote. “This is why, throughout the hospital, he is known only by the name Tan.”

 

The second patient was an 84-year-old man named Lelong. Lelong had better luck than Tan/Leborgne, because he could say five words: “oui” (which is French for “yes”), “non” (“no”), “tois” (which in actuality was a mispronounced “trois”, meaning “three”), “toujours” (“always”), and “Lelo” (his own name, mispronounced).

 

Sadly, both patients died soon after Broca’s encounter with them. Upon performing their autopsies, Broca discovered that in both cases, the brain’s frontal lobes had been damaged. Broca was able to make a more specific observation: that ultimately responsible for their severely afflicted speech were lesions to the left cerebral hemisphere’s inferior frontal gyrus. Or, simply put, the surface of the left frontal lobe.

 

“The integrity of the third frontal convolution (and perhaps of the second) seems indispensable to the exercise of the faculty of articulate language,” Broca reported to the Anatomical Society. “I found that in my second patient, the lesion occupied exactly the same seat as with the first… immediately behind the middle third, opposite the insula and precisely on the same side.”

 

This discovery was so important that the part of the brain that was its subject was later named after Broca.

 

More than words

 

Like Hodor, Tan demonstrated the capacity to communicate a variety of thoughts and emotions through the use of a solitary word. This in turn showed neuroscientists that while specific sections of the brain are responsible for certain functions, language itself is in fact controlled by different parts of the brain. While one region controls a person’s language comprehension, another is responsible for language production, meaning damage in one area will not affect the ability controlled by the other area.

 

In short, Hodor, like Tan, sustained an injury in the part of the brain responsible for language production, but not language comprehension.

 

Lastly, Tan’s case exhibited the fact that speech is extremely complex and not simply a combination of words. The information we gather from spoken communication is independent of the words that make up language.

 

Revisiting Leborgne and Lelong’s brains

 

The brains of Leborgne and Lelong have actually been reexamined in recent times, using modern neuroimaging technology, specifically high-resolution volumetric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

 

The resulting images show that the extent of the patients’ brain lesions was actually far deeper than Broca reported. In particular, the lesions extended into the superior longitudinal fasciculus, which is a large intrahemispheric fibre tract connecting anterior and posterior language areas.

 

What does this imply? It suggests damage to other areas aside from those identified by Broca could have also contributed to their vastly impoverished speech. This in turn could mean damage to the Broca’s area alone would have only caused mild speech problems, and not the kind observed in Leborgne, Lelong, and their fictional counterpart, Hodor.

 

Other causes

 

Speech difficulties similar to but not as severe as Hodor’s and Tan’s can also be caused by malnutrition – specifically a lack of vitamins received by the individual during early childhood or while still in the mother’s womb.

 

Given Hodor’s enormous height and girth, however, it is more likely that Hodor was dropped on his head as a baby. Perhaps even intentionally, because, come on, this is “Game of Thrones” we’re talking about. Nothing is ever an accident on “Game of Thrones”.

 

Hodor? Hodor. — TJD, GMA News