A few days ago, the news spread that a famous Spanish radio and television presenter, named Josep Lobató , shared on Instagram a video of his progress in recovering the speech he had lost due to a demyelinating disease .

In it, one can intuit the effort Lobató must make to pronounce words as simple as “no” and “yes”, something healthy adults can do automatically, without paying any attention to the realization of the chain of movements necessary to do it.

Naturally, most of the information related to the health of the presenter is confidential, and it is not too much known whether Josep Lobató will be able to fully recover his speech or not. However, this does not mean that the viralization of his video has not helped many people to show their support and solidarity , which I support.

What exactly is a demyelinating disease, and why can it cause someone to have trouble talking? I will give a brief explanation on the subject below, but first it is necessary to know what a substance called myelin is.

What is myelin?

Myelin is a substance that, by covering the part of the nerve cells that elongates to reach distant sites (called the axon), makes the inside of the neuron relatively isolated.

And what is the use of this? Basically, the fact that the myelin sheaths cover the axon making it look like a string of sausages allows the electrical impulses traveling through it to go much faster. We can imagine it as if wrapping the channel through which the electricity travels would make the electricity more channeled and advance only where it can, i.e. through the axon and not out. Thanks to the myelin these nerve impulses are not scattered everywhere, losing their power .

Whether nerve impulses travel slower or faster is not simply a matter of patience; for the brain to function well, many networks of neurons need to be synchronized and sending out massive amounts of information all the time. That means that there are mental processes that can only be performed if there are many nerve cells functioning at the expected speed, and that if the electrical signals sent by some neurons go much slower, the whole process fails in its entirety. Which explains part of what demyelinating diseases are.

The diseases of demyelination

A demyelinating disease, as its name suggests, is characterized by a process of demyelination, that is, the destruction of the myelin sheaths that cover part of the neurons.

That does not simply mean that because of this disease we are going to do things much more slowly. Although the speed at which nerve impulses travel through the neurons may seem to be quantitative, as there are many different speeds, a significant delay in signal transmission produces qualitatively different consequences from what would happen without that delay. This is why demyelination is not limited to making us speak more slowly, for example, but can also cause us to lose the ability to speak .

The other consequences of demyelination

But the effects of demyelinating disease are not just about speech. Myelin covers the axons of all types of neurons, regardless of whether or not they play a role in speech functioning, and so the destruction of myelin sheaths can be seen in our ability to perform many types of actions.

Some diseases in which demyelination occurs, for example, are Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease, in which symptoms include spasticity, involuntary eye movements or dementia, or leukodystrophies, which are related to the appearance of spasms and vision problems, among other ailments. But the best known demyelinating disease is multiple sclerosis, which affects all kinds of processes and is very harmful to the entire central and general nervous system.

These diseases are another sign that in our mental life not only do neurons matter, but there are other elements that interact with them to make everything work as it should.