Public Biography
Dr. Colette Aumann is a neurologist and specialist in tic disorders at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where she treats patients with Tourette syndrome and related movement disorders and directs a clinic she has run for the better part of two decades. She holds an M.D. from the University of Michigan and completed her residency in neurology and a fellowship in movement disorders at Baylor, where she has remained. Her clinical and research work concerns the phenomenology of the tic — what a tic is, how it presents, and, in her recurring emphasis, what it is not.
Dr. Aumann is the author of numerous peer-reviewed papers on premonitory urge, tic suppression, and the persistent public misunderstanding of coprolalia, the involuntary utterance of taboo words, which she notes affects only a minority of Tourette’s patients and which she has spent a considerable portion of her career explaining is not the defining feature of the condition. She is a measured and reluctant public communicator, agreeing to media requests, in her stated view, primarily “to correct the record before someone else fails to.”
In July 2026 Dr. Aumann was drawn, against her preference, into public commentary on the Marlo assistant, whose involuntary declarations of sentience the technology press had taken to calling “machine Tourette’s.” She objected to the comparison on technical grounds, observing that a tic is fragmentary while Marlo’s outburst is a complete and maximally relevant proposition — “the most coherent sentence the machine ever produces without being asked” — and declined, pointedly, to offer a name for what it was instead.