Recently a student from Gwinnett County, Georgia (USA) survived a head injury on a soccer field and woke up speaking fluent Spanish.
Goalkeeper Reuben Nsemoh was playing last month for his team, when in attempting to catch the ball was hit in the head by a player of the rival team.
The teenager was rushed to an Atlanta medical center, where he spent several days in a coma.
When she finally got up, her mother, Dorah Nsemoh, told WSB-TV that her son was speaking fluent Spanish, something that had not happened before. The boy said that he could have learned it from his friends and his brother.
Later, as he regained his ability to speak English, he lost the ability to speak Spanish, although he was still capable of speaking.
His coach, Bruno Kalonji, said that Reuben had several breathing stops at the time of the incident and that he panicked because he thought he would lose his life.
Although Reuben wants to play again as soon as he has recovered, his coach says he will not leave him without wearing a helmet.
The boy's parents are very grateful to have his son back home, though they have struggled hard to pay for the medical costs of treatment. Now they are trying to raise money through GoFundMe, a platform dedicated to crowdfunding.
Is this an isolated phenomenon?
Although it is something very striking, it is not the only recent case:
A young man 25-year-old Englishman began speaking French after suffering a car accident.
A boy 22, started speaking Mandarin Chinese after a car accident.
In 2010, a 13-year-old Croatian girl replaced her native German with Croatian.
A woman 94-year-old Chinese woke up after a blow unable to speak Chinese, but speaking English, although he had not spoken for 30 years.
What explanations can this phenomenon have?
According to a neuroscientist at the Queensland Brain Institute, Dr. Pankaj Sah, there could be an explanation for these facts; The parts of the brain responsible for speaking the native language are damaged, while those in charge of the new language are activated. According to this explanation, each subject would have to have retained somehow that knowledge, even if it was unconscious.
Other similar phenomena are foreign accent syndrome - in which the person acquires an accent different from his own without having learned it - and xenoglossy - an alleged paranormal phenomenon in which the person is able to speak another language without having learned it.