
I woke up unable to speak English - dcminter
https://www.bbc.com/news/disability-45804613
======
wpietri
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 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...](https://logmatic.io/blog/a-how-to-guide-to-debugging-with-android-
logcat/)

~~~
hobls
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., after which she spent several days
fighting meningitis. She came out of it okay, thankfully, but I still vividly
remember how scary it was to watch her "talk."

~~~
wpietri
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-
uti...](https://www.alzheimers.net/2014-04-03/connection-between-utis-and-
dementia/)

And yes, it is entirely freaky when somebody you have known for years starts
talking utter gibberish and clearly expects to be understood. It feels deeply
unreal.

~~~
dcminter
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.

------
lisper
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 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.)

~~~
appleiigs
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.

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

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

~~~
thaumasiotes
I was talking about the children.

~~~
rconti
Hm, "basic Mandarin" sounds like much less than "native, unexercised" to me,
as I feel that the latter implies an earlier native fluency, but I see that
could be a matter of opinion. Eg, it's possible they can fully understand her
but can't speak it particularly well.

------
klaudioz
I've some weird type of a migraine which sometimes I'm not able to read or
speak properly in English or Spanish (Always one of these combinations,
fortunately). It's like I forgot how the words are "divided by syllables" and
I'm not able to read or speak properly. Fortunately, it's for a few minutes
and I got a migraine just one or two times a year. I went to the doctor and he
said it's not dangerous and there is nothing to do. Some people have migraines
every week, even in the worst cases with vision loss so my problem is nothing
compared to that.

~~~
ksenzee
That sounds really frustrating. Do you have to warn friends and co-workers in
advance? Or is it short-lived enough that you can just go hide until it
passes?

~~~
klaudioz
Yes, I did it. Actually, I have a sleep mask in my job. It's useful to reduce
a headache when everything is normal again. I discovered it a few years ago
after 20 years having this migraine but the read/speak thing started about 8
years ago (at least).

------
eggie5
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.

~~~
cestith
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.

~~~
mabbo
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.

~~~
cestith
I somehow doubt nasal surgery will account for what I lost after a blunt force
head trauma, but it might mitigate things by addressing other issues. Thanks
for the idea.

------
dkuznetsov
Something similar, albeit not as severe happened to me, also as a result of a
bicycle-related head injury.

I was on my way back home in Montreal. I consider English to be my second
language. I have two mother tongues - Ukrainian and Russian. And, due to
living in Montreal, I had passable French. So I lost ability to speak or
understand French for a few days. After I re-gained it, it became visibly
worse. Also I had short term amnesia - didn't know who I was, where I lived or
where I was going from/to. Luckily, most of the things came back to me within
the next few hours or days.

Brain is a bizarre device...

------
excalibur
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.

~~~
bostonpete
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.

~~~
rconti
I worked from home for 12 weeks to help my wife recover from a surgery. She
initially needed help moving around the house, for her safety, and slept most
of the day.

Brain injuries are EXTREMELY difficult and time consuming to recover from, far
more so than more typical injuries. The woman in the article was almost
certainly going through a massive adjustment and needed tons of help. It's not
a simple matter of a bump on the leg and shoulder, and whoops, she's living in
a country where she doesn't know the language, as if she was a tourist.

~~~
socceroos
I take ~3 weeks off to help my wife post-baby for the same reasons.

------
nashashmi
I think humanity is complicating the study of the brain by using the feedback
of the individual as a basis to create judgement. Example: "I don't remember"
= "memory loss"

For the example above, it could be

    
    
      "i don't remember" 
    
      => memory blocked 
    
      => too much information interference 
    
      OR 
    
      emotional hinderance like fear of remembering
    
      OR 
    
      insufficient information to recall
    

It is difficult to explain, but we are studying very basic primitive feedback
responses to try to determine very complex problems. And we study mental
conditions and neurological conditions separately that one hardly informs the
other.

Here is a theory: Prior chronic emotional pain can stymy recovery of cognition
permanently. Beneficial emotions can activate new parts of the brain and
create new personalities unlike what existed before.

------
SlySherZ
If I remember correctly, when you learn a new language after age 10, the brain
encodes the new language in a region adjacent to the one where your mother
language is encoded, which means that any localized injury on this part of the
brain may impact your ability to speak just one of them.

Source: Sapolsky's lecture about language:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIOQgY1tqrU&list=PL150326949...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIOQgY1tqrU&list=PL150326949691B199&index=23)

If you want to understand better how the brain works, I really recommend
watching the whole course.

~~~
temetnosce
I grew up speaking Mandarin in my household and spoke English at school, but I
also picked up Spanish in highschool and Japanese in college.

If I were to guess, my brain would probably place Mandarin and English in
"mother language" part of the brain and Japanese and Spanish part in the
adjacent region. I wonder what I would lose if I were to sustain an injury.
Would I lose one group over another group?

On another note, as with many American highschool students learning Spanish, I
fell out of practice and now I can't really communicate in Spanish at all.
When I do attempt to speak Spanish, I notice that I sometimes replace words in
Spanish with Japanese ones. Can't be sure whether or not it's because of
phonological similarities of Japanese and Spanish, or maybe my Japanese
overwrote some of my Spanish.

------
Jill_the_Pill
Not 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_...](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0431763/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl)

------
Proof
I remember reading cases where elderly people in nursing homes who have lived
in (Sweden?) for almost their entire reverted to speaking Finnish as that was
the language they grew up speaking.

I put Sweden in parentheses with a question mark because I can’t be sure that
is in fact Sweden. It could also be the US. I read about it awhile ago and not
in English. Sorry.

------
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.

~~~
princekolt
As someone who has moved out of their home country, and that barely speaks
their native language anymore, I can kind of picture this happening to me.
I've literally forgotten things about the language I've spoken all my life
after not speaking it daily for just 3 years. It's very weird and vexing at
times.

------
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.

------
xster
<I'm not a linguist, please don't laugh at my elementary knowledge> 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.

~~~
posterboy
This is a very lame summary of Chomsky's position. Genetics is not at the core
at all. The minimalist program and universal grammar are the key search terms
for it. The idea was cleverly paraphrased to be rather unspecific.

The term _grammar_ is rather formulaic, but the problem is broader, if
language ability is seen as an important factor for intelligence.

------
oliveshell
I believe this sort of thing is known as aphasia; it was fascinating to read
about what it can be like in someone multilingual.

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.

[1]:
[https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/eclipse](https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/eclipse)

------
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_achromatopsia)

------
qwerty456127
I've once drank too much vodka and found myself totally unable to speak my
native language (which I used everyday during those says and what everybody
around was speaking) and only able to speak English (or French). That happened
to be fairly inconvenient as the friend of mine that was drinking with me was
particularly bad at foreign languages.

------
pasbesoin
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.

~~~
sangnoir
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.

~~~
pasbesoin
Yes.

I was fine after that first week. During it, I'd just gone from intensive
French (zero to third-year college level conversational and academic
proficiency/placement in seven weeks) to a German class, with a week or two in
between the one ending and the other starting.

In all my secondary language learning, I've worked hard to leave other
languages behind/alone and just function, including mentally, in the target
language. I wanted to express an idea, and it came out in French. Not words or
phrases; my brain was simply in "French mode".

That's what I'd been doing for a couple of months (in Vermont, not even in
another country), and it took a while to regain some flexibility in that
pattern.

------
jasonvm
Reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode with Robert Klein called Wordplay.

------
tshanmu
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat)

------
drdeadringer
I experienced something a bit similar during a migraine episode whilst in
University.

Normal day occurs and I rent a movie from the school library; 'M' [1931]
starring Peter Lorre. German spoken, English subtitles. I functionally don't
know German; English is my native language. All is well.

Partway through the film I notice my migraine symptoms coming on [grey-green
soup-static eating into my vision from my optical peripheral, tingly numbness
spreading up from my fingers, &c]. I know I'm screwed for the night, the best
I can do is take pills and hope to "sleep it off" at this point. I decide to
trooper it out and keep going with the movie 'cause I'm at a loss either way
and I know this dance.

But then I realize that I could no longer understand the English subtitles, a
new symptom for me at the time. I could read the subtitles, I knew they were
English, I knew I knew I should be able to understand them, but I couldn't
take their meaning. So here I am watching a movie where I don't understand the
spoken or written language at all. All I had was my enjoyment of Peter Lorre,
my appreciation of film noir, my love of film, and the inherent fundamental
understanding of body language and facial expression.

About 75% through the film, one of my roommates comes in and sits down. "So,
what're you watching?"

I swear he thought I was drunk.

Me: "This guy ... kill kids ... whistle. People ... not like guy."

Him: "Take your time."

Me: "This ... the people. Police ... no nothing. People ... this! ... these!
... people ... get guy."

Him: "OK."

Me: "The town... guy on trial. No police. Him! Bad guy. Whistles. Dead ...
kids. City people ... guy on trial. No police."

Him: "I think I understand. Are you ok? Had too much?"

Me: "OK. Migraine. Watching movie. See? This ... Peter L-L-Lorre. Buggy eyes.
Actor. Like a bug."

Him: "... yes. He's in this movie."

Me: "Famous actor! Now ... guilty from ... mob. The city. Death no police but
... dead whistling."

Him: "OK. Sounds like a good movie. See you tomorrow."

Me: "Yes. Tomorrow good ... movie."

=-0-=-0-=

I'm not kidding, I actually did talk like a drunken over-acted dramatization
of Shatner. My actual language skills were out the window that night. I can't
tell you how many times I dropped my Imitrex pills onto the floor before
dropping myself into bed.

Yes, I'm better now against the migraines so I have little worries there on
that matter but back then it was a going concern.

~~~
posterboy
Since the symptoms are similar to a stroke, I'd be careful about going on, if
there's the slightest chance that it can cause damage.

~~~
drdeadringer
On the whole I agree, but at least on the surface I could still smile and
operate both arms properly. The finger-tingling was "ambidextrous" [if that
makes sense], as was the vision issue ["ambiocular"? I make up words and
phrases as convenient sometimes].

But yes, look out for strokes. "FAST" ... Facial drooping, Arm weakness,
Speech difficulties and Time to call emergency services.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAST_(stroke)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAST_\(stroke\))

