I woke up unable to speak English • Hacker News Board

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#11

Post by PakG1 » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

excalibur wrote: post #6

Not questioning the husband's devotion to his wife, but it seems a bit odd to me that he would take an 18 month sabbatical and focus on re-teaching her a language that keeps slipping out of her mind due to brain injury. You would think that teaching himself German would be the low-hanging fruit.

I imagine there could also be some hope that through "exercise", the brain and nervous system could try to rebuild its former capacity. Physiotherapy for the brain. I imagine that would be a good thing for her health in general. I've read a lot of articles over the years about the possibility, but never read anything conclusive. So it's just hearsay, but I can imagine hanging onto this kind of hope if I were in his shoes. It wouldn't be about communicating with her, it would be about helping her heal and preventing anything from getting worse.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#12

Post by i_cant_speel » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

cdoxsey wrote: post #8

excalibur wrote: post #6

Not questioning the husband's devotion to his wife, but it seems a bit odd to me that he would take an 18 month sabbatical and focus on re-teaching her a language that keeps slipping out of her mind due to brain injury. You would think that teaching himself German would be the low-hanging fruit.

Presumably she still needs to interact with other English-speaking people.

Right. I think this is the real reason for teaching her English.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#13

Post by bigtones » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 5:14 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #2

This article is entirely plausible to me. I have dealt with two relatives with brain tumors. Between disease and treatment, I have seen some incredibly weird stuff. It makes me realize how little we understand how minds work. The best analogy I have is to think of your smartphone from the perspective of a normal user. You're used to it working fine. But suddenly it stops working fine. So a technical friend hooks up a…

Also brains can remap themselves over time so if pathways are broken, sometimes new pathways can be built.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#14

Post by eggie5 » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 5:14 PM UTC

I lost my sense of smell and taste after a head injury. I remember walking into a Starbucks and it wreaking of fish! The hardest part was when I first bit into a cookie, post injury, and I couldn't recognize the taste :(

Took months to get it all back.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#15

Post by DelightOne » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #2

This article is entirely plausible to me. I have dealt with two relatives with brain tumors. Between disease and treatment, I have seen some incredibly weird stuff. It makes me realize how little we understand how minds work. The best analogy I have is to think of your smartphone from the perspective of a normal user. You're used to it working fine. But suddenly it stops working fine. So a technical friend hooks up a…

The most important: Theres no documentation saying how it works, its not modularized, whatever bastard got the idea to create such a system... nice, clean, elegant and consistent abstractions and APIs, please!

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#16

Post by epicide » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

DelightOne wrote: post #15

wpietri wrote: post #2

This article is entirely plausible to me. I have dealt with two relatives with brain tumors. Between disease and treatment, I have seen some incredibly weird stuff. It makes me realize how little we understand how minds work. The best analogy I have is to think of your smartphone from the perspective of a normal user. You're used to it working fine. But suddenly it stops working fine. So a technical friend hooks up a…

The most important: Theres no documentation saying how it works, its not modularized, whatever bastard got the idea to create such a system... nice, clean, elegant and consistent abstractions and APIs, please!

The idea of a brain API is both amazing and terrifying.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#17

Post by sannee » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 5:28 PM UTC

bigtones wrote: post #13

wpietri wrote: post #2

This article is entirely plausible to me. I have dealt with two relatives with brain tumors. Between disease and treatment, I have seen some incredibly weird stuff. It makes me realize how little we understand how minds work. The best analogy I have is to think of your smartphone from the perspective of a normal user. You're used to it working fine. But suddenly it stops working fine. So a technical friend hooks up a…

Also brains can remap themselves over time so if pathways are broken, sometimes new pathways can be built.

It's effectively biological version of fuckit.py [1]

[1] - https://github.com/ajalt/fuckitpy

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#18

Post by hobls » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 5:32 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #2

This article is entirely plausible to me. I have dealt with two relatives with brain tumors. Between disease and treatment, I have seen some incredibly weird stuff. It makes me realize how little we understand how minds work. The best analogy I have is to think of your smartphone from the perspective of a normal user. You're used to it working fine. But suddenly it stops working fine. So a technical friend hooks up a…

Absolutely agreed. Brains are bizarre. My mother-in-law once had what we (and her primary physician) believed was a serious flu. The moment we realized that it was much worse than that was when she started calmly speaking total nonsense. She appeared to think it was normal English, but each word was unintelligible, though it used plausible parts of speech. At that moment I picked her up and drove her to the E.R., after which she spent several days fighting meningitis. She came out of it okay, thankfully, but I still vividly remember how scary it was to watch her "talk."

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#19

Post by dkuznetsov » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

Something similar, albeit not as severe happened to me, also as a result of a bicycle-related head injury.

I was on my way back home in Montreal. I consider English to be my second language. I have two mother tongues - Ukrainian and Russian. And, due to living in Montreal, I had passable French. So I lost ability to speak or understand French for a few days. After I re-gained it, it became visibly worse. Also I had short term amnesia - didn't know who I was, where I lived or where I was going from/to. Luckily, most of the things came back to me within the next few hours or days.

Brain is a bizarre device...

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#20

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

epicide wrote: post #16

DelightOne wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important: Theres no documentation saying how it works, its not modularized, whatever bastard got the idea to create such a system... nice, clean, elegant and consistent abstractions and APIs, please!

The idea of a brain API is both amazing and terrifying.

[deleted]