

The Writer Who Couldn't Read - jgg
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127745750

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edanm
If you've never read it, I love Oliver Sack's book "The Man who Mistook his
Wife for a Hat": [http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-
Wife/dp/0684853949...](http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-
Wife/dp/0684853949/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277371133&sr=8-3).

It's an amazing book full of stories just like in this article, about
incredibly strange things that sometimes happen to people's brains.

It's also the scariest book I've ever read: it made me realize, more than at
any other time, just how much of who I am is determined by my physical body,
which is incredibly easy to break. There are stories in there of people who
can't understand the idea of "left" anymore. They can see out of their right
eye, not their left. They can turn right, _but not left_. They can eat food
off their plate, but only on the right side. Freaky as hell.

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mahmud
Fascinating.

I had a similar experience while backpacking; sometimes I would get up at
night to use the bathroom or drink water and I wouldn't remember what city or
country I was in. I would have to retrace my journey from the last place I
remember, and mentally arrive at where I am. The hardest part is figuring out
the position of the light switch in a dark room.

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jbrennan
I recall reading of a famous amnesiac who after much instruction, developed
muscle memory for drawing mirror images (or something, ironically I forget…).
Point being, muscle memory is quite a powerful construct.

I wonder how great of a typist Engel was/is?

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jallmann
Engel was able to compensate for the loss of function in one cortex by
shifting the work to another.

This probably gets more difficult with age; that he is able to do it at an
advanced age is a testament to the plasticity of the brain. Remarkable.

~~~
tomjen3
Not really. There are two reasons why people tend to change less as they age,
none of which has anything to do with the brain:

Old people are just stubborn. There is little that is new for them, and they
have habits that covers most, if not all, of what they do.

The older you get, the less time you have (think family and kids) which means
you have less time to adopt new habits.

Your brain plasticity actually remains and there is very little physical
reason not to improve as you age.

~~~
ramchip
What about language acquisition? I think it's quite established that ability
goes down with age. My experience seeing retired people (with plenty of free
time) taking language classes is that they take quite a bit more time to
achieve the same results. Pronunciation is especially hard to fix.

~~~
ekidd
Adult language acquisition is a really weird problem.

tl;dr: Plenty of adults actually _can_ learn foreign languages if they put in
the hours, though few have sufficient dedication. But maybe not everyone.

First, some background on my own experience: I started learning French a
little about 2.5 years ago, past the age of 30. I can read non-fiction books
in French, and about half the articles in Le Monde. Right now, I'm only
studying French a few minutes a day, to maintain my knowledge while working on
my startup. Later on, I'll go back to several hours of study a day. (I'm
currently at ~350 hours of cumulative study.)

Here are some of things I've noticed about adult language learning:

1) You can be an enormously gifted language learner with no skill for accents.
Alexander Arguelles, for example, has a extremely high degree of fluency in at
least 6 languages, a solid command of another 12, and conversational abilities
in many more. But his accents are generally terrible. In contrast, I have a
decent ear for accents, and some people are amazingly gifted.

2) Learning a foreign language is a beastly amount of work: 250 hours for
conversational ability (if you're gifted), 1000 or 2000 for moderate fluency,
and several thousand more to get really good. Basically, if you're an adult
and you're not fully immersed in the foreign language, it requires the kind of
dedication you'd need to run a startup. Most people don't seem to have that
kind of dedication.

3) It's possible to gain fluency in a foreign language past the age of 65.
Google "Steve﻿ Kaufmann, polyglot", for example, who's still going strong. And
there's a Japanese guy who picked up Chinese and Korean after 65, and who has
started on French around the age of 100.

4) There is _some_ kind of declining neural plasticity, at least for some
people. It's a truism that virtually every single 5-year-old gains fluency in
the language spoken by their peers. But as people get older, a smaller portion
of the population succeeds in learning a foreign language. And past 20, there
will almost always be small defects that mark you as a (highly fluent)
foreigner and not a native.

So if you're interested, and willing to pay a steep price in time and effort,
you might as well go for it. I'd be happy to write up a post explaining how to
make best use of your first 250 hours of study, if people are interested.

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sliverstorm
The fact that one of the most famous artistic minds in history was a composer
who couldn't hear (for me) somewhat reduces the impact of the title.

Not to downplay his accomplishment in combating the condition- he is, to me, a
very impressive man.

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eru
OK, but Beethoven's hearing problems weren't caused by his brain.

