18-year-old Matej Kus was out cold for 45 minutes after the crash, but when he woke up he conversed fluidly in English with paramedics, even speaking in an English accent.
The teenager had just begun to study the language and his skills were described by friends and team-mates as “basic at best”.
Wow...can I do that? As long as the head trauma doesn't kill me!
Unfortunately, the guy doesn't remember anything about the accident or speaking English in proper British fashion...
Here's the whole article:
September 14, 2007 10:25am 18-year-old Matej Kus was out cold for 45 minutes after the crash, but when he woke up he conversed fluidly in English with paramedics, even speaking in an English accent. The teenager had just begun to study the language and his skills were described by friends and team-mates as “basic at best”. Peter Waite, the promoter for Kus's team, the Berwick Bandits, told the Daily Mail: "I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "It was in a really clear English accent, no dialect or anything. Whatever happened in the crash must have rearranged things in his head. "Before his crash Matej's use of the English language was broken, to put it mildly. "He was only just making a start on improving it and struggled to be understood, but was keen to learn. "Yet here we were at the ambulance door listening to Matej talking to the medical staff in perfect English. "Matej didn't have a clue who or where he was when he came round. He didn't even know he was Czech. "It was unbelievable to hear him talk in unbroken English." Unfortunately, the speedway driver's new found skills didn’t last and he remembers nothing of the accident or the following two days. He is now keen pursue studies in English. He told the Daily Mail, through an interpreter: "It's unbelievable that I was speaking English like that, especially without an accent. "Hopefully I can pick English up over the winter for the start of next season so I'll be able to speak it without someone having to hit me over the head first. "There must be plenty of the English language in my subconscious so hopefully I'll be able to pick it up quickly next time."Czech crash victim wakes up speaking English
They say that you remember everything, it's just retrieval that's the problem. So, if this guy has heard English or watched it, he would have absorbed way more than he thought he knew. Amazing story. Would your book (below) be a good Book Club read? It sounds like it.
Posted by: Margaret | Monday, June 30, 2008 at 10:29 AM
That is amazing! Not sure it's worth the head trauma though. Maybe it will give some scientists some ideas about how to do that, without the concussion.
Posted by: tinker | Sunday, June 29, 2008 at 12:50 AM
That is really cool! I remember years ago when my friends and i would talk to each other in our fake language ... we all secretly wished someone would recognize what we we were saying. We had hoped our brains had actually retrieved memory of perhaps another life when we lived on foreign soil. But it never happened. Probably on both accounts.
Posted by: shawn | Friday, June 27, 2008 at 10:15 AM
I'm by no means an expert in language acquisition, but I've come across similar stories while reading about it. Specifically, there was a study done on stroke victims who were bilingual but learned the second language after learning the first. When you learn a second language this way, it is stored in a different part of the brain than the first language. In some cases where the part of the brain containing the first language was destroyed, the patients were actually able to communicate in the second language, which was stored in another area of the brain. I think language and the brain is fascinating.
Posted by: Arlene | Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 07:28 PM