the doctor’s automatic lectures

Following a stroke, a doctor could no longer talk ... but he could recite, verbatim, any one of several familiar lectures and rants that he had used on patients for his whole career. Apparently, frequently repeated information is stored in a different part of the brain, so that it can be spoken on autopilot, a kind of reflex. If you have ever gotten the impression that an expert isn’t really having an interactive conversation with you, this may be why!