Comment by Mario Rodgers on April 13, 2010 at 3:55pm

There are things I do in my dreams that I could never do in my waking life as well.

Comment by Cara Coleen on April 13, 2010 at 4:02pm

You're right, Mario, so do I. I go on adventures every night to places I've never seen in my life... I'm not nearly so imaginative while I'm awake! Paul McCartney wrote an entire song in a dream and thought someone else had written it... until he realized he had.

Comment by Cara Coleen on April 13, 2010 at 4:45pm

Wow. That's really incredible. Our brains are weeeird!

Comment by Franco P on April 13, 2010 at 9:04pm

weeeeeeeeeeeeeird

Comment by Reggie on April 14, 2010 at 1:39am

I don't buy this for a second.

Comment by Cara Coleen on April 14, 2010 at 9:33am

Yeah, it'd be slightly more convincing if they had a video, buuut... it is a bit fishy.

Comment by kelltrill on April 14, 2010 at 9:36am

I studied cases like this during a language pathology course in my Linguistics degree. It's legit. These types of things happen when certain areas of the language centre of the brain are adversely affected. I've heard of things like this happening before. It's uncommon but not unusual. Most of the examples and case studies I have are in subscription journal articles I'm afraid so I can't post the links here. Similar areas of the brain are effected in the case of severe stutterers where they can sing and speak their second language fluently but stutter violently only in their first language.
Aphasia, for example, is another interesting language pathology. There are many different kinds, but one of the primary kinds if Wernicke's Aphasia (or fluent Aphasia). A patient who has had a stroke or suffered a brain injury will babble on in completely fluent gibberish but will access all of the wrong lexical items and so no one will be able to understand a word they say.

Comment by Cara Coleen on April 14, 2010 at 9:39am

"fluent gibberish"... what does that mean? I may be reading the sentence wrong, but it sounds like there's actually a "language" of gibberish that the patients are not able to pronounce? Please explain. :)

Comment by Radu Andreiu on April 14, 2010 at 10:39am

Example of fluent Aphasia: I called my mother on the television and did not understand the door. It was too breakfast, but they came from far to near. My mother is not too old for me to be young.
It think you should understand why it's Aphasia and why it's fluent.

About the Croatian patient, I don't know if it's true or not, but I think it's possible, because our brain stores a lot of information even if we're not aware of it. The girl probably got in touch with all of the essential things she needed to speak German fluently and her brain stored all that information, but she couldn't access it properly before she got into that coma. During the coma, the brain could have arranged all that information in the right way for her to speak German, but she had to have studied German some time before. It's just a hypothesis, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible.

Anyway, I don't believe for a second that people could start speaking languages they haven't heard before, but if they did hear and even studied them, it's possible. Again, I have no idea if this case is for real or not.

Comment by Cara Coleen on April 14, 2010 at 10:45am

Ahhh... Aphasia must be what a couple of friends of mine and I spoke when we were in 6th grade! We used to talk non-sense like that all the time because we thought we were so clever. I don't think we had any idea it was actually a condition! But yes, I do see how you could speak that fluently, and apparently I do. So, what Kelly is saying is that they were speaking in that way but still couldn't even say the words right? What a terribly frustrating experience that must be.

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