Interesting fact!

[telophase]

I listen to the podcast Oh No Ross and Carrie, which is about them trying various New Age/alternate/spiritual/alt-med/etc. movements and remedies and stuff and reporting as to whether they worked, or anything happened, etc. but that's not important to this post.

In the current episode, Carrie is talking about recent surgery she was anesthetized for. When she woke up, she couldn't speak* English, and instead could only speak (bad) Spanish.

So it turns out, as you may already know and I had a hazy idea of, that your first language (and presumably any languages you also learn early enough?) are stored in the Broca's area of your brain. Languages acquired later are stored in several other areas of your brain.

When you wake up from normal sleep, your brain wakes up in a more-or-less orderly fashion, and Broca's area comes online reasonably early. But when you wake up from anesthesia, your brain wakes up much more randomly, and since your later-acquired languages are stored in several places around the brain and your early-acquired one(s?) are in one spot, there's a reasonably high chance the secondary-language areas will wake up before Broca's area does. Hence the phenomenon of waking up from anesthesia speaking another language. Carrie speaks (and I think might be in the process of learning right now?) Spanish, but only to a small extent, hence waking up speaking bad Spanish.

Anyway, I found that fascinating.

*Technically she couldn't speak at all, as it was a tonsillectomy, but she was trying to write in English and couldn't.

Comments

[lilysea]

English is my first language

I regularly experience aphasia [inability to find the right word for a concept, when its a word that I would usually know]

and weirdly, I am MUCH more likely to not be able to find common every day English words

than I am to not be able to find fancier English words [I also struggle much more with nouns than with adjectives]

I have wondered if it's because I learned the common English words

much earlier than I learned the fancier English words

and so they are stored in a different part of my brain?

[telophase]

I'd think it's possible. Or it could be something else, since the brain is complex.

I've got something similar in that I periodically temporarily lose words, although the commonality/fanciness of them doesn't seem to be a factor with me. Since I don't lose the concept, in these cases I can usually describe it so (actual example) I'll say to myrialux "The thing you put things in to make them cold!" and he'll supply "Refrigerator."

I'd heard that some language-processing disorders can go along with ADHD, and when I got the neuropsych evaluation I asked if my periodically losing words was part of that. I was tested to have significantly less ability in short-term memory than in other types of thinking processes, and the evaluator said yes, it could be a function of the (comparative) deficit in short-term memory in me.

[elistaire]

That's fascinating stuff!

[silverr]

That's wild!

[calandrahunter]

Brains (and the rest of the human body) are SUPERWEIRD.