Two years ago, Australian Benjamin McMahon emerged from a coma that had lasted more than a week after a terrible car accident, but could only speak Mandarin.
The 22-year-old recalls how he woke up and saw an Asian nurse by his bed and told her in Chinese, "Sorry nurse, I feel pain here."
Then he asked the nurse for a piece of paper and a pen and he wrote in Chinese: "I love my mom, I love my dad, I will get well."
His newfound language skills confused his doctors as well as his parents. Ben's father, Mark, and his mother said it would be a miracle if their son survived.
“We got a call from the hospital and they said, 'Oh, Mark, look, I just wanted to call and let you know that Ben was actually starting to come out of the coma' … and she said, 'I don't know how to say that … He speaks Mandarin, Mark said on Tenplay.
“None of us can speak Mandarin, so we just nodded, but deep down we were very worried about what was happening. Despite studying Mandarin at school, Ben never spoke the language fluently.
“I didn't realize what Mandarin was saying, I just came out of a coma and that was the most natural thing for me,” Ben said.
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It took him another two or three days to remember how to speak English. Since then, Ben's language skills have opened up new opportunities for him, such as working as a guide for Chinese tourists in his hometown and participating in a Chinese TV program.
Now he has moved from Melbourne to Shanghai to study commerce at university. He said that he was lucky to be alive and to speak a second language. But what happened to Ben is not the only case of its kind. In 2010, a 13-year-old Croatian girl woke up and began to speak fluent German.
Most recently, in July 2013, a veteran of the US Navy was found unconscious in a motel room and did not remember who he was, but spoke fluent Swedish. A neurologist at the Queensland Brain Institute thinks he can explain what happened to Ben.
Dr. Pankaj Sah noted that the brain is made up of various circuits that aid in language, breathing, speech and thinking - similar to electronic circuits. According to him, perhaps the following happened to Ben - parts of the brain that remembered English were damaged in the accident, and those that retained the memory of the Mandarin language were activated when he woke up from a coma.