famous people who overcame stuttering

STAMETS IS of medium height and stocky build. His graying beard, round face, and glasses recall Jerry Garcia. As he tells it, mushrooms came into his life because of a humiliating stuttering habit. "I always stared at the ground and couldn't look people in the eye," he recounts. "That's how I found fungi."

He remembers pelting his seven-year-old twin brother with puffball mushrooms, watching the spores explode in his face. But Stamets didn't get serious about mushrooms until he was 18, when he ingested psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. Hallucinating alone in the Ohio countryside, he got caught in a summer thunderstorm and climbed a tree for shelter. Waiting out the storm, Stamets examined his life. "I asked myself, 'Well Paul, why do you stutter so much?' So I repeated, 'Stop stuttering now,' over and over again, hundreds of times. The next morning, someone asked, 'Hi Paul, how are you?' I looked him right in the eye and said, 'I'm fine, how are you?' I didn't even stutter. That was when I realized mushrooms were really important to me."

When the weather calmed, he climbed down and hiked home. On his street, he ran into a neighbor whose attractiveness had always intensified his stammer. “Hi,” she said. “How are you today?”

“Fine, thanks,” he answered, with an ease that astonished him. “And you?”

From that moment, Stamets’ tongue began to come untied, and he devoted himself to learning about the fungi that he credited with the change. With the help of a mushroom-identification book, he found psilocybes growing wherever he looked, and he began to probe the mysteries of other species as well.

Simon began stuttering severely when she was eight years old. A psychiatrist tried unsuccessfully to cure her stuttering. Instead, Simon turned to singing and songwriting. "I felt so strangulated talking that I did the natural thing, which is to write songs, because I could sing without stammering, as all stammerers can."