A Georgia teenager went into a coma after a soccer injury and came out fluent in a language he barely knew. Doctors couldn’t explain it, his parents couldn’t believe it, and linguists are still trying to wrap their heads around it.
16-year-old Reuben Nsemoh was playing a usual soccer game when suddenly, he lost consciousness. He had dived for the ball during a routine play in 2016 when another player’s cleat slammed into his head. The blow knocked him unconscious. He began having seizures on the field before being airlifted to the hospital, where doctors placed him in a medically induced coma.
For three days, he underwent treatment while his parents waited for him to wake up. But when Nsemoh finally opened his eyes, they rushed to his bedside and then froze. The teenager tried to speak, but the words weren’t English. They were Spanish, fluent Spanish. His first words were “Tengo hambre,” or “I am hungry” in Spanish.
Everyone was stunned, but couldn’t really do much. “It started flowing out,” the boy opened up to TIME. “I felt like it was like second nature for me. I wasn’t speaking my English right, and every time I tried to speak it, I would have a seizure,” he said. For a while, he couldn’t even recall how to speak English. (via Time)
“My son is awake, I don’t care what language he’s speaking. Whatever went on, he’s alive today and I believe 100 percent in recovery,” his mother, Dorah Nsemoh, said.
Doctors at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta explained that head trauma can sometimes rewire neural pathways connected to speech. In rare cases, the brain “defaults” to languages that were previously learned, even passively, and temporarily suppresses the native tongue. It’s known as the equally bizarre Foreign Accent Syndrome.
As it turns out, Nsemoh had grown up around Spanish-speaking teammates and picked up bits of the language from conversations and practice sessions. It’s possible that this long-buried linguistic exposure became his brain’s survival backup, surfacing after the concussion scrambled his brain’s language centers.
Thankfully, over the next few weeks, the kid slowly regained his English language skills. However, his Spanish remained sharper than before, and he speaks both languages fluently now. “It was weird,” Nsemoh revealed. “It was not scary at all. I actually liked it a lot. It was really unique to me,” he added.
While he claims that his Spanish is slowly fading, Nsemoh’s story went straight from tragedy to neurological miracle. It serves as a reminder that the human body has its miraculous ways to survive. And sometimes, when the brain resets, it wakes up speaking in different tongues.
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