How can a person completely lose their memory but still be able to speak a fluent language?
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It really depends on what type of brain trauma we’re talking about. Memory is basically is basically your brain retracing it’s steps and attempting to reconstruct the situation you’re trying to recall. So if there’s memory loss, it’s not that the memory is “gone” it’s just that the brain doesn’t know how to get back to the set of sequences to “recall”. If someone is still able to speak, that just means that the pathways to recall language are unharmed. But, once again, this REALLY depends on the brain and what type of damage we’re talking about.
There are different kinds of memory.
Memories of your personal experience are episodic memories, whereas general knowledge (like language) are semantic memories. We aren’t 100% sure, the different kinds of memories likely use different parts of the brain. So one part can be damaged while the other part is perfectly fine.
Different parts of the brain. Language is not a matter of your brain remembering thousands of different words and how to use them together.
There are different kinds of memory. For example how to do physical tasks, recalling facts, speech, facial recognition, etc. Each type of memory depends on a specific network of brain areas that overlap incompletely with the other types or memory. Damage to specific brain areas, for example the medial temporal lobes in Alzheimers disease, may decrease function within one network, but not others. AD is a good example of what you’re asking about.
Your brain isn’t one unified structure. It’s lots of different structures that are coordinating and doing lots of different stuff. There is even a part of the brain responsible for making you believe that your internal personality is in charge and in control of all of this stuff (in the frontal cortex, except it’s not really in charge).
Our ability to speak is associated with two areas of the brain, Broca’s area (talking to others) and Wernicke’s area (understanding when someone is talking to you).
Our ability to access specific memories is associated with the hippocampus and the temporal lobe.
Brain damage (everything from swelling to more permanent damage like cell death due to stroke or internal bleeding) to the temporal lobe can cause memory loss but still leave those two areas related to speech completely functional.
It depends what parts of their brain are effected by whatever injury or illness is causing it.
My dad had a closed head injury that gave him extremely poor short term memory. He could recall stories from his childhood or describe the night he met my mom, but might forget what he was talking about a moment before, or not recall what he had done that afternoon.
He was in a support group with someone who’s head injury made he lose her ability to write. She had to relearn from scratch. She would send him letters that looked like a child wrote them.
My great grandmother, as she got old, started to have trouble recognizing even her closet family, then one day she forgot how to speak English, and could only speak German, her mother tongue.
Imagine the brain as a fully functioning city hub. There’s a big fire and the library burns down, so all that knowledge is lost. But the radio towers are all still fine and communication still occurs, even if it is far less informed.
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