Washington, July 28, 2024 – Kamala Harris’ rambling ‘word salad’ speeches may be a symptom of a little-known but common psychological condition called logorrhoea — also known as verbal diarrhoea.
The US Vice President, who was endorsed by Joe Bidden after he bowed out of the presidential race on Sunday, is known for her jumbled, sometimes incoherent speaking style.
Some of her most infamous speeches have included ones about the ‘significance of the passage of time’ and the ‘need to get to go and need to be able to get where you need to go’.
A baffling anecdote about falling out of a coconut tree has also been a rich resource for internet meme-makers, and a study that analysed Ms Harris’s speech during a vice presidential debate concluded that ‘social factors’ were the most likely cause of her ‘word salad’ rambling.
Ratu Annisa of the University of North Sumatra said: ‘The causes of the speech errors made by Kamala Harris are social factors, both situational anxiety and social circumstances.’
A 2009 study of the condition in Spain found the risk of logorrhoea was linked to level of schooling.
Those with lower educational achievement were more likely to ‘speak in circles’.
It can be a symptom of anxiety or over-confidence, but logorrhoea can be no laughing matter — and may indicate a brain injury, autism or serious condition, although there is no indication that Ms Harris suffers from these conditions.
Logorrhoea is also associated with laughing wildly at random moments, something Ms Harris has become known for, with Donald Trump even nicknaming her ‘Laughin’ Kamala’.
American behavioural specialist Gregg Levoy wrote in a blog on Psychology Today that for people who ramble on and on, speech can become ‘a barrier rather than a connector’.
He wrote: ‘It’s easy to dismiss them as merely narcissistic, but this is immensely hard to undo and not necessarily their fault.
‘It’s a holdover from that original egocentric stage around one or two years old, when children naturally feel grandiose and at the centre of the universe.’
But logorrhoea is also a common frontal lobe deficit that many traumatic brain injury survivors suffer, and is linked to several serious psychiatric and neurological disorders.
These include schizophrenia, lesions on the brain, damage to areas of the brain that deal with language, and ADHD.
People with autism may also display logorrhoea, defined as uncontrollable or jumbled talking, due to an inability to organise their thoughts or read social cues from other people.
Ms Harris became tongue-tied during a speech about ‘expanding access to transportation’ at the White House in July 2022.
She said: ‘You need to get to go, and you to be able to get where you need to go, to do the work and get home.’
The same year, she made a widely-mocked speech about high-speed internet in Louisiana, saying: ‘The Governor and I and we were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time.
‘The significance of the passage of time.
‘So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires, what we need to do to create these jobs.
‘And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children.’
Ms Harris’s preoccupation with time raised its head again last April at a political event on reproductive rights.
She told attendees: ‘I think it’s very important…for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualise it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.’
Last March, she asserted that, during Women’s History Month, ‘we celebrate and we honour the women who made history throughout history, who saw what could be unburdened by what had been.
‘On at least two occasions, she has spoken of her baffling love for Venn diagrams, a simplistic illustration that uses overlapping circles to show the relationship between two or more sets of items. (Mail Online)
