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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.
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.
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…
Perhaps more common, but still quite rare at about one person per year worldwide, is something called foreign accent syndrome. In which a head injury causes someone with one regional accent to speak the same language with a different accent afterward, often resembling the accent of another region. Examples have included from US to British, US to French, an Oregon woman developed an Australian one, etc.
Sensory changes, changes in personality, and other things can happen with stroke or accidental brain trauma, too.
One particularly interesting case is hinted at in this article, but if you're interested your favorite search engine should turn up many more cases.: https://www.thecut.com/2016/10/the-boy-who-came-out-of-a-com...
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.
Theres an episode [1] of Helen Zaltzman’s fantastic podcast The Allusionist that deals with a similar story: a woman who has to essentially re-learn how to speak and understand English after a brain aneurysm.
I highly recommend giving it a listen if you’re interested; it’s only half an hour or so and really deepened my appreciation of how plastic and resilient our brains can be.
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.
My brother in law had something similar happen to him recently: He was playing golf and suddenly lost the ability to speak. Turns out he was having a stroke. He had no other symptoms, no loss of of motor ability, nor the ability to understand language, nor the ability to write. He didn't even realize he was having a stroke. He drove himself home where his wife recognized that he was having a stroke and drove him to t…
Similar thing happened to a family friend. She had a stroke and lost her English and could only speak her first language, Mandarin. She was an English literature teacher in Canada for 40 years. Her children only had basic Mandarin... not a good situation.
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.
What? It's far more practical to reteach his wife the language she lost, which also happens to be his first language AND the primary language of the country they live it.
A lesson the American school system could stand to learn too. :/