Man wakes up in hospital speaking fluent Chinese - World's Weirdest Events: Episode 8 - BBC Two

meet Ben mcmah born as an English-speaking Australian he now speaks fluent Mandarin gentlem local and stars in his very own Chinese talk [Music] show his fluency however is down to something far more dramatic oh my God a car crash I can remember the morning having breakfast with my dad but apart from that it's like a blank week from what I understand I was a passenger in in the car and a truck crashed into the side of the car Ben was involved in a horrific Collision which left him in a coma for a week and when he woke up things were very different [Music] he could only speak Mandarin okay a language he studied at school but by his own admission he was never fluent so what on Earth had happened where language is stored in the brain is still somewhat of a mystery but the area commonly associated with language is found in the frontal load of the left hemisphere a region called the brockus area and although we don't know exactly what happened in Ben's brain following the accident we do know that he was sitting on the left side of the car when it was hit and suffered injuries to the left side of his head specifically his frontal lobe experts believe that Ben's language switch could have been due to the damage to the brockus area of his brain we're still learning Lots about why this phenomenon occurs when somebody speaks with a different language following uh a head injury or a stroke in Ben's case it would seem that the area of the brain where he stored and used his native tongue English was more damaged than that where he had learned Mandarin as a child unintentionally switching languages in this way is known as bilingual Aphasia and those with the condition can often find themselves suddenly better at their second language Ben was now speaking Mandarin more fluently than he ever had before so had his accident improved his language skills surely not once English was taken away from him he could only use Mandarin access to that second language is improved because that's all that you've got available to you luckily for Ben once the swelling on his brain had gone down his English began to come back which should have meant that his days of speaking Mandarin were over but fantastically Ben kept his new found fluency it seems that this freak accident permanently unlocked the second language and changed Ben forever

Channel: BBC

Views: 57,776

Keywords: bbc two, bbc 2, worlds weirdest events, coma, chinese, language, Foreign language syndrome, weird, strange, ben mcmahon, china, english

Id: CA67Dk6SmuU

Length: 3min 33sec (213 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2016