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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...
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."
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...
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.
Reminds me of the heavy bertations news caster. She knew what she was trying to say but it was coming out as jibberish and the scary thing is that her brain still recognized the fact that she wasn’t making sense. One of those things that scares me.
Doesn't even have to be that serious. My young son went off on a sleep walk once, came in speaking complete gibberish (like a random sort on a dictionary) but in a totally normal rhythm and cadence. After I regained composure and figured out what was going on, and redirected him he want back to bed, artfully working his way around the usual Lego detritus everywhere his path. So weird you can be basically unconscious but still so functional!
Someone I know had a father-in-law with brain cancer that destroyed his ability to speak -- but he could still sing. So, that's how he communicated up until the end.
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 regional accent to speak the same language with a different accent afterward, often resembling the accent of another region. Examples have included from US to British, US to French, an Oregon woman developed an Australian one, etc.
Sensory changes, changes in personality, and other things can happen with stroke or accidental brain trauma, too.
One particularly interesting case is hinted at in this article, but if you're interested your favorite search engine should turn up many more cases.: https://www.thecut.com/2016/10/the-boy-who-came-out-of-a-com...
If you are interested in the brain, there are good royal institute lectures on youtube.
The Neuroscience of Consciousness – with Anil Seth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI
The Neuroscience of Memory - Eleanor Maguire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdzmNwTLakg
Also, any book by oliver sacks is great if you'd rather read books rather than watch lectures.
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.
Also brains can remap themselves over time so if pathways are broken, sometimes new pathways can be built.
The most important: Theres no documentation saying how it works, its not modularized, whatever bastard got the idea to create such a system... nice, clean, elegant and consistent abstractions and APIs, please!
> b) they aren't designed
It does seem like a reasonable statement, but when you take a bit of time to think about it, billions of people disagree with it. A sobering thought.
> so there's no expectation that they should make sense under the hood
What doesn't make sense is that at first you deny a religious explanation, then without skipping a beat you ascribe (what can ironically be described as divine) mysteriousness and inscrutability to a body organ.
This not only doesn't pass the Occam's razor test, but also assumes a defeatist position that "we might never know for sure".
EDIT: I've taken uncharitable tone with this comment, and it may come across as too personal, which wasn't my intention.
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 evolutionary quirks, some to make to make it's slightly more efficient, others to make some biological functions easier, etc. In the end, it might turn out that the actual human intelligence is not that hard to understand once we got through understanding all those design quirks.
This might sound ridiculous - after all a human brain looks so much more complex than an iPhone! But if you didn't know anything about transistors, analog circuit design, digital logic design, computer architecture, OS architecture, and software engineering (not to mention the complexity of cellular protocols), you would have a really hard time reverse engineering a smartphone.
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.)
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.
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.
I have migraines every once in a long while where I lose the ability to read. I can sound out words and recognize them but can't grok the meanings of the simplest sentences. Every thing else is fine. I can speak and reason perfectly. Just not read. It is the weirdest thing I've ever experienced. I definitely have more compassion for illiterate people making their way in life.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
Presumably she still needs to interact with other English-speaking people.
I imagine there could also be some hope that through "exercise", the brain and nervous system could try to rebuild its former capacity. Physiotherapy for the brain. I imagine that would be a good thing for her health in general. I've read a lot of articles over the years about the possibility, but never read anything conclusive. So it's just hearsay, but I can imagine hanging onto this kind of hope if I were in his shoes. It wouldn't be about communicating with her, it would be about helping her heal and preventing anything from getting worse.
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.
>Not questioning the husband's devotion to his wife
But baseless assumptions are ok?
I am happy for him he was in a position where he could take an 18 month sabattical. I would be fucked.
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
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.
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...
If you want to understand better how the brain works, I really recommend watching the whole course.
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.
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_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
<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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode with Robert Klein called Wordplay.
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.
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.