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I woke up unable to speak English

bbc.com

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Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#31

Post by zn02 »

cestith wrote: post #25
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…

If you search around the 'net you'll find a number of cases in which a person's principle language has changed after a traumatic brain injury. Some people have even become fluent in a language they only recalled a pidgin vocabulary from before. 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 r…

> Some people have even become fluent in a language they only recalled a pidgin vocabulary from before.

I wonder if could use this to learn languages more effectively. This kind of changes after a trauma shows that we remember more than we think.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#32

Post by Waterluvian »

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…

My mental model is that the brain is a black box and unlike so many other human components, we can't break it open and learn how it works on a mechanical level. We're left with feeding it inputs and seeing what the outputs are as a way to understand how it works.

This means that at best we can have a cause-effect understanding of the brain. Until we can describe the mechanics of the brain with a strong enough model where the resulting behaviours can be predicted, we can't truly understand what the brain is doing.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#33

Post by tormeh »

sannee wrote: post #17
bigtones wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sounds like shellscript.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#34

Post by macspoofing »

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.

>Not questioning the husband's devotion to his wife

But baseless assumptions are ok?

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#35

Post by rconti »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #29
appleiigs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 good, but going from "native unexercised Mandarin" to "fluent" is a lot easier than suddenly having to learn a foreign language.

I mean, other than not being able to communicate with her children or fellow Canadians.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#36

Post by thaumasiotes »

rconti wrote: post #35
thaumasiotes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not good, but going from "native unexercised Mandarin" to "fluent" is a lot easier than suddenly having to learn a foreign language.

I mean, other than not being able to communicate with her children or fellow Canadians.

I was talking about the children.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#38

Post by Crisco »

I know someone who had a similar experience after an operation where he wasn't able to speak English, only Spanish. Interesting thing was, his mother tongue is English and he learned Spanish when he was around 20. He eventually recovered after a few hours, but I've always wondered how it would feel to know you knew a language perfectly at one point yet be unable to understand it in the moment.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#40

Post by 24gttghh »

This reminds me of "An Anthropologist On Mars" by Oliver Sacks. The first story of seven is of a painter who gets in a car accident. He develops Cerebral achromatopsia[0] and loses the ability to see and think in terms of any colors other than basically a gray-scale. It was this story (among the others in the book) that helped me become aware of just how interconnected and bizarre the human brain is.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_achromatopsia

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