why do people with amnesia not forget their primary language?
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It’s fascinating how specialized the different parts of the brain are. Even what we might consider a single skill may actually be several separate abilities that are stored in different areas of the brain.
For example, years ago I worked at a teletype service(TTY) that helped people with communication disabilities make phone calls. One day I got a call from someone who wanted to call a friend who had lost her speaking due to a stroke. Since the vast majority of my calls were from/for the deaf and hard of hearing, I wasnt used to calls for the speech-disabled, so I initially set the call up incorrectly.
We were supposed to hear the woman who could speak. She would talk directly to her friend. The friend was then supposed to type her response on her TTY machine; her message would appear on my computer screen and I would read it out loud for her friend, and so on.
However, I inadvertently reversed the set up, so that we could hear the speech impaired woman and so I was able to hear how badly the stroke had devastated her speaking ability. She couldn’t form any words at all. ..”The only sounds out her mouth were “ahhhh…ahhh”
The point is that one would have thought the stroke had destroyed all her language skills, But after trying again, I was able to set the call up correctly and it turned out that she could write brilliantly. Although she’d lost all her verbal skills, her ability to recall and write words and phrases and apparently not been affected at all.
I learned that day that language and speech are not only different, but that damage to a certain part of the brain can potentially destroy one without even touching the other.
I would think the ones who banged their heads and begin speaking french have lived part of their life in, guess what, France.
edit changed word bang for banged
I had amnesia once, it lasted just a short drive. I was very upset panicked, then I got so nuts emotionally bam, suddenly i.forgot what I was so upset about and who I was what I was doing. Scary thing was I was driving and I could still steer but forgot the brake pedal and kept wondering if I need to stop what do I do. After i calmed down a few moments and relaxed more suddenly I remembered again. It was not enjoyable
I was in a plane crash when I was 8, and awoke with retrograde amnesia. It’s the weirdest thing. I knew when I woke I was in a hospital but had no memory at all of existing before I woke up. I did not know my name, I did not know any of the people there, So I figured I was dreaming. Because I was paralyzed and aphasic, no one knew I was an amnesiac. I had to figure out what was happening on my own, and it took about a month to figure out it wasn’t a dream. When my father told me there had been a crash and my mother was killed, I started crying, and he thought I was crying because of my mom, who I was apparently very close to before the crash. But really I was crying because I knew now it was not a dream, and something horrible had happened. To this day I have no memory or emotion linked to my mom. Pictures of her are like pictures in a newspaper of strangers. It took me a while to learn how to talk again, and I wasn’t back to normal for about 7 years, so I never told anyone of this until years later. They had no idea.
Anectode:
My grandmother was Danish, but moved to Norway when she married grandpa. Over time, her language became increasingly Norwegian and decreasingly Danish though she always had an accent. The two languages are mostly mutually intelligible, but very noticeably different.
Then, in her 90’s, she had a stroke and immediately reverted to fluent Danish without a trace of Norwegian accent. And then her language changed back to Norwegian again over a few days.
Language is weird, brains are weird.
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