I woke up unable to speak English
1–10 of 105 posts
Re: I woke up unable to speak English
#2This 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 cable and turns on debug logging and all you see is a wall of gobbledygook. [1] You ask what's going on and he starts describing an enormously complicated array of components and systems, and explains that he doesn't really know how most of them work, and that there are a bunch he probably hasn't even found yet. He can try this and that and the problem maybe gets better and maybe gets worse. You're forced to realize that the phone you trusted and thought you understood is beyond your ready comprehension.
Even that analogy fails in that a) minds are much more complicated, b) they aren't designed, so there's no expectation that they should make sense under the hood, and c) you cannot buy a new brain. If it's broken, well, maybe it'll get better and maybe you'll just have to get used to it being kind of broken and be grateful it works at all.
[1] https://logmatic.io/blog/a-how-to-guide-to-debugging-with-an...
Re: I woke up unable to speak English
#3Not to make light of a woman's quite serious injury, but it reminded me of the short film Fluent Dysphasia where a head trauma causes Stephen Rea to only speak and understand Irish gaelic.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0431763/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_...
Re: I woke up unable to speak English
#4My 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 the hospital. Fortunately, they arrived in time to get a TPA shot and he made an almost full recovery. He seems completely normal, but every now and then he will still make an odd word substitution completely out of the corn flake. (Yeah, that's what it sounds like when it happens.)
Re: I woke up unable to speak English
#5This 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…
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Re: I woke up unable to speak English
#6Not 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.
Re: I woke up unable to speak English
#7My 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.
Re: I woke up unable to speak English
#8Not 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.
Re: I woke up unable to speak English
#9Reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode with Robert Klein called Wordplay.
Re: I woke up unable to speak English
#10Not 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.
The article doesn't say he took a sabbatical to re-teach her English -- it says he took the sabbatical to support her. It also doesn't say he didn't work on improving his German during that time.