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I woke up unable to speak English

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Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#71

Post by dcminter »

wpietri wrote: post #66
hobls wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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., aft…

Which reminds me, I should mention that for anybody with an elderly relative who experiences a sudden decline in the direction of delirium or dementia: make sure they don't have a urinary tract infection. I have no idea how that plumbing is connected, but I have seen it happen myself, and apparently it's a not-uncommon experience for people with Alzheimer's: https://www.alzheimers.net/2014-04-03/connection-between-ut…

Or indeed other infections. As it was explained to me, elderly people sometimes can't get a fever so the first sign something is wrong can be confusion and other odd behaviour.

In the case of my late mother, it manifested as a fixation on and paranoia about money.

Definitely one to bear in mind.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#72

Post by Retric »

shkkmo wrote: post #64
RIMR wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we get there. We designed everything in a smartphone and can say with confidence that it works a certain way, and even explain why. The brain was designed by evolution, and while we mostly understand what it does, we aren't quite sure of the how and why yet.

> The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we get there. Perhaps. While the mobile phone might be more complicated than the human brain (I suspect not), that doesn't mean that the human brain is perfectly understandable. The smartphone was designed by a large number of groups that all built and shared abstractions with the express purpose of thes…

No single person understands how a modern smartphone is built. From the camera optics, transistors, OS, wireless systems, AI, etc it simply covers enough domains to be incomprehensible for a single person. What abstraction provides is a means for organizations to understand it.

By comparison DNA is actually a fairly reasonable, program 3 Billion base pairs, but fairly compressible and that’s covering far more than just the brain. But the brain lacks those easily separated chunks, making it harder to decode but not nessisarily more complex.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#73

Post by xster »

I only knew Noam Chomsky from his political thoughts and knew he dabbled in linguistics but never knew what exactly he contributed to in this field.

I only found out recently (while reading The Story of Human Language) that he's actually huge[ly disruptive] in the field and came up with this line of thinking. That language isn't just an expression of culture or of general intelligence but is genetic.

His justifications were that 1, in cases where children were isolated from outside contact from birth, once reintegrated at an older age, they can become "generally intelligent and cultured" but can fail to ever learn a language which is very peculiar. 2, that culture can be wildly diverse but there are no non-speaking human groups just like there are no non-reproducing human groups. And 3, this particular case. Where damage to the brain affects very particular parts of not just speech but language without affecting other cognitive functions.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#74

Post by sangnoir »

pasbesoin wrote: post #56

I came back from a summer intensive course in French. Although I was already fluent in German, for a week after returning, every time I opened my mouth to speak German, French came out.

Was German your second language? I had a similar 'displacement' experience while learning a third language - my brain would offer phrases in my second language instead! I suspect it was defaulting to "how do I say this, but not in my first language" and whichever language is more readily available is served up.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#75

Post by p1esk »

shkkmo wrote: post #64
RIMR wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we get there. We designed everything in a smartphone and can say with confidence that it works a certain way, and even explain why. The brain was designed by evolution, and while we mostly understand what it does, we aren't quite sure of the how and why yet.

> The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we get there. Perhaps. While the mobile phone might be more complicated than the human brain (I suspect not), that doesn't mean that the human brain is perfectly understandable. The smartphone was designed by a large number of groups that all built and shared abstractions with the express purpose of thes…

still be easier to understand and reason about than the latter because the former was designed to be easy to understand.

All those things you mentioned: clean separation of concerns, standard libraries, etc, are only easier to understand if you already know about them. If you have no clue what a standard library is, what it does, or how it fits in the design, then you're faced with more complexity to understand than a code which implements everything from scratch.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#76

Post by p1esk »

wpietri wrote: post #65
p1esk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

minds are much more complicated It's actually not clear if brains are more complicated to understand than modern smartphones. Modern smartphones are designed using numerous abstraction levels - it makes it easier to design, but harder to understand if you don't know those abstractions. Brain, on the other hand, might have fewer fundamental algorithms/methods. In fact, most of the brain complexity could just be evolut…

You will note that I said minds, not brains. Even once we understand the hardware of the brain, I think we'll have an incredibly long way to go to understand the mind that runs on top of it. I'll add that the neurologists I've talked with understand a great deal about the hardware of the brain; the organ has been receiving intense study for a long time. But even for them their most common reaction is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ when c…

You will note that I mentioned both hardware and software components of the smartphone. If you have no idea where one starts and another ends, then all you see is electrons running around in circles, both in a brain, and in a smartphone. Most mobile CPU designers would have a hard time debugging iOS apps, and most iOS devs would have a hard time debugging Apple A12 design. This, however, does not mean that fundamental principles which make a smartphone "smart" are hard to understand: concept of a stored program, high level programming language commands, user interface, etc. But these fundamental principles are buried behind massive design complexities which might not be directly related to the "intelligence" aspect of the phone (computer). I suspect (hope) this also applies to brains.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#77

Post by jamesgeck0 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #30
2chen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If she can't retain it, then teaching it to her is not practical, regardless of how useful it would be if she hypothetically learned it. A lesson the American school system could stand to learn too. :/

That's not the situation. She did improve significantly, although not to complete recovery.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#78

Post by mabbo »

cestith wrote: post #21
eggie5 wrote: post #14

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.

I lost not all but a good portion of my sense of smell, and it never came fully back. That was over twenty years ago.

A co-worker of mine got some kind of nasal surgery and got back some long lost part of his sense of smell. You mind consider looking into that.

I have had a poor sence of smell my whole life, it seems, and have considered looking into why and how it might be fixed.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#79

Post by Baeocystin »

RIMR wrote: post #52
novaleaf wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actually, if you believe in natural evolution, brains are designed. just because there isn't any intelligence involved, doesn't mean that the brain isn't a meticulously crafted piece of perfection.

Our brains evolved by having the features needed to keep us alive long enough to reproduce. Ultimately we, as a species, designed our own brain.

Hydrogen, given long enough, starts to wonder where it came from, and where it is going.

Re: I woke up unable to speak English

#80

Post by DoreenMichele »

I have serious health issues. My mother is German and I speak a little German, though not that well. However, I would have had early exposure to the language.

I have had a few incidents where, for an hour or so, I was exhausted and distressed and couldn't manage to speak English, only German. I could understand English, but not speak it.

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