In 2012, a 22-year-old man arose from an automobile accident-induced coma in Melbourne, Australia to baffle doctors. Ben McMahon woke only to find that he could communicate only in Mandarin, the language he studied through secondary school.
Although McMahon was able to regain his proficiency in English after weeks of careful speech therapy, he still cannot communicate the shock he faced with his newfound fluency.
He admitted that he should not have been nearly as proficient as he found himself to be based on the extent of his performance in the classroom, but he later embraced the incident by enrolling in a higher level Mandarin course in University and joining several multicultural groups.
McMahon's case was extreme, but it was not the first. Scientists often attribute this phenomenon to "bilingual aphasia," when different languages are retained in different parts of the brain. If one section is injured, a person's brain could transition over to another stored language, Discovery reports.
"Honestly, the brain is the most interesting place there is," Dr. Pankaj Shah told Australia's ABC News.
