Imagine yourself now: smart as a whip, but suddenly unable to share your thoughts or understand a loved one’s words. That’s aphasia, a cognitive condition that impairs the ability to understand or process language.
“Aphasia is this sort of symptom that calls attention to itself immediately,” says David Knopman, MD, a professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “The difficulties in processing or expressing verbal and written communication are obvious to the patient themselves or the people around them. The exact cause of it can then be diagnosed with imaging.”
Aphasia has various causes. The most common is a blood vessel blockage to the language center in the brain, usually triggered by a stroke or acute trauma, such as a gunshot wound. It can also result from a gradual and insidious neurodegenerative disorder, like Alzheimer’s.
And it’s fairly prevalent, affecting roughly two million Americans, according to statistics from the National Aphasia Association.
These eight notable people have all dealt with aphasia.
Bruce Willis
Bruce Willis, the action-movie star best known for his roles in the Die Hard movie series, decided to step away from his career after being diagnosed with aphasia at 67. The news was first reported by his ex-wife, Demi Moore, in an Instagram post.
“To Bruce’s amazing supporters, as a family we wanted to share that our beloved Bruce has been experiencing some health issues and has recently been diagnosed with aphasia, which is impacting his cognitive abilities,” Moore wrote. “As a result of this and with much consideration Bruce is stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him.”
The post was accompanied by a photo of a younger Bruce Willis in a bathrobe, shower cap, and sunglasses. The post ends: “As Bruce always says, ‘Live it up,’ and together we plan to do just that.”
Sharon Stone
The Basic Instinct star and Oscar-nominee for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s Casino saw her meteoric rise crash down in September 2001, when, at the age of 43, she collapsed in her home from a brain aneurysm and endured subsequent cerebral hemorrhaging that lasted nine days.
When Stone was discharged from the hospital, she had lost her ability to read and had developed speech issues, including a stutter. Her new difficulty reading and memorizing lines brought her career to a standstill.
"I became more emotionally intelligent," Stone told ABC News. "I chose to work very hard to open up other parts of my mind. Now I’m stronger. And I can be abrasively direct. That scares people, but I think that’s not my problem. It’s like, I have brain damage; you’ll just have to deal with it."
Her recovery has earned her several TV and cinematic roles, including the HBO murder mystery Mosaic.
She is an ardent advocate for stroke awareness, hosting events and raising money for the Women’s Brain Health Initiative.
Randy Travis
After the Grammy-winning country music star was hospitalized because of viral cardiomyopathy, a virus that attacks the heart, he suffered a stroke in 2013. Travis lost his ability to talk and to comprehend language. His ongoing struggles with aphasia mean he still does few interviews, as his ability to speak is severely limited.
He described his struggle with aphasia in his 2019 memoir, Forever and Ever, Amen: A Memoir of Music, Faith, and Braving the Storms of Life. He wrote:
“In my case, my brain was functioning, and I could understand what Mary [Travis’s wife] said to me, but I could not respond in anything close to a sentence. When we first returned home, I could barely speak at all. We spent three months in speech therapy before I learned to say the letter 'A.' Eventually, after about a year and a half, I could say 'yup,' 'nope,' and 'bathroom.' I could also say 'I love you' and a few other phrases but not much more. All this was extremely frustrating for me; I felt like I was trapped inside the shell of my body.”
Travis is determined to help others overcome similar struggles. He and Mary started the Randy Travis Foundation to provide support for victims of stroke and cardiovascular diseases.
Mark McEwen
The former weatherman and entertainment reporter worked on CBS This Morning and The Early Show for 16 years. He covered awards shows, several Olympics, and interviewed five different U.S. presidents before suffering a stroke in 2005.
He documented his long and arduous recovery in his memoir Change in the Weather: Life After Stroke, as well as in a TEDx talk, and has gone on to become a stroke awareness activist. He has written on his website about his own mild battle with aphasia and how singing songs by Stevie Wonder and the Beatles helped him speak more fluently.
“At first I struggled a bit with aphasia, but I was one of the lucky ones and that slowly went away,” he wrote.
He has used his platform to showcase people who have suffered from the condition.
As a host of the National Stroke Association’s Raising Awareness in Stroke Excellence (RAISE) Awards, McEwen has honored groups like Aphasia Lunch Bunch, a Las Vegas–based support group that provides classes, activities, conferences, educational materials, and videos to members and their caregivers.
Michael Hayden
The four-star general, who served as the director of the NSA in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and then the director of the CIA under Bush and President Barack Obama, suffered a stroke just before Thanksgiving in 2018. Unable to read, General Hayden learned the alphabet all over again from his 4-year-old grandson.
While Hayden’s intelligence was left intact, the lost ability to read and write has been permanent. Some of his attempts to write on Twitter have amounted to nonsense — a frustrating experience for a man with a lot to say about current events.
“I am grateful that the stroke did not take my ability to understand and process and that my higher-level thinking was not affected,” Hayden told CNN in May 2019. “I am grateful my memory is strong. I am grateful to be a part of an aphasia study at Georgetown and for my therapists who have helped me come so far. I am grateful for my friends and colleagues who continue to call and visit and speak with me. With every conversation I become stronger.”
In that article, Hayden discussed his frustrations with an inability to speak fluently. But the work he has put in with therapists and speech pathologists has paid off. He has recently been a guest on talk shows, clearly articulating his criticism of President Trump’s bellicose rhetoric toward protesters denouncing systemic racism and police brutality across the country.
Emilia Clarke
Shortly after she finished filming the first season of Game of Thrones, in 2011, Emilia Clarke was working out with her trainer when she experienced a painful headache that she says felt like an elastic band was squeezing her brain. She shared her experience of suffering a subarachnoid hemorrhage, an uncommon type of stroke caused by bleeding on the surface of the brain, in an essay for The New Yorker last year.
In the aftermath of the hemorrhage, she could not remember her name. “Instead, nonsense words tumbled out of my mouth and I went into a blind panic. I’d never experienced fear like that — a sense of doom closing in,” she wrote.
Her aphasia disappeared after a week, but the dread of being unable to express herself in language lingered. It led her to start Same You, a charity to broaden neurorehabilitation access for young people after a brain injury or stroke. The charity aims to fund research for innovative therapies, raise awareness about the prevalence of brain injuries, and train advanced brain injury nurses.
Gabby Giffords
Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was hosting her first “Congress on Your Corner” event outside a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, in January 2011 when a gunman opened fire on the crowd, striking her in the head.
Giffords’s struggle with aphasia left her unable to articulate more than a few words in a response to questions for years, but she was still able to sing songs she learned before she was nearly assassinated. That phenomenon occurs because the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for language, but the right hemisphere is more specialized for carrying a tune.
Her persistent effort to recover has now enabled her to read prepared speeches, which she did in dramatic fashion at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
Since retiring from Congress, Giffords and her husband, the astronaut Mark Kelly, founded Giffords, an anti-gun-violence organization that promotes sensible legislation to address the crisis of gun violence.
Dick Clark
The iconic host of American Bandstand, the $10,000 Pyramid game show, and Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve suffered a stroke in December 2004 that left him with paralysis on his right side and a bout of aphasia that took away his ability to deliver his signature sign-off, “For now, Dick Clark — so long!”
Clark returned to the New Year’s celebration the following year and continued to cohost every year until his death in 2012.
“Dick Clark announced to the world that people can have strokes and still continue to function,” Robert Thompson, PhD, the director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, told the Los Angeles Times.
In its obituary for Clark, the Los Angeles Times noted that many people who suffer strokes shrink back from life, but Clark was fearless and refused to let it slow him down. The improvement he achieved year after year showed people how the hard work they put into their recovery can pay off.
Jordan M. Davidson
Author
Jordan Davidson is a freelance health and science writer interested in everything from nutrition and fitness to hobby farming and medical breakthroughs. His work has appeared in many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, Men’s Health, Prevention, Science Friday, The Scientist, and General Surgery News. He is senior copywriter at FCB Health in New York.
Davidson spent years as an ESL teacher in New York City public schools before transitioning to journalism. He holds a bachelor's degree from Brown University and master’s degrees in education and journalism from The City College of New York and the School of Journalism at CUNY. Davidson is now based in upstate New York after living in Bali, Indonesia, and volunteering on farms in Australia and New Zealand. He’s always on the hunt for good pub trivia.