Was zum Teufel?

Girl wakes from coma, speaks German
By Emily Sohn/MSNBC.com

After 24 hours in a coma, a Croatian girl woke up speaking only German, according to reports that spread across the Internet last week. The 13-year-old had been studying German in school and watching German television shows on her own, according to various versions of the story, but she was not fluent until after the incident. Meanwhile, she lost the ability to speak her native language.

Discovery News did not confirm the report with the girl's doctors or parents, but experts say the story is plausible — to some extent.

In a condition called bilingual aphasia, people often lose one of their two languages because different parts of the brain are involved in remembering each one, explained Michael Paradis, a neurolinguist at McGill University in Montreal.

Even if a brain injury affected the Croatian teenager's memory of her native language, the brain areas that were learning German could have remained untouched.

"This has been observed thousands of times," Paradis said. "It's not surprising at all. I'd like to know all the facts, but it's quite possible that after a coma, you'd have problems which might be located in such a way in the brain that they affect one language but not another."

What can't be true, though, is the claim that the coma gave the girl fluency that she didn't have before.

"I looked on the Web and saw comments that she recovered perfect German," Paradis said. "This cannot be the case. If she recovered German to the point that she could communicate well, that's fine. That's the kind of thing you would expect."

The human brain sure is complicated. It's hard to imagine it but it really is like a filing cabinet where you don't know where everything goes. Get kicked by a mule and you may forget algebra. Fall down a well and speak perfect mandarin. If nothing else this story may hurt Rosetta Stone. You could save a lot more money by going to a few Spanish lessons and OC and then getting whacked with a golf club and spending some time in a coma.