American teenager awakens from fluent coma in Spanish

We here at Mega Curioso have already talked about some extraordinary cases of people who suffered head trauma and woke up from their fainting or different comas, as was the woman who saw again after 21 years blind, and another who suffered an injury brain and developed an amazing memory.

For the story we are going to tell next involves an American teenager who was kicked in the head, spent several days in a coma in the hospital, and woke up speaking fluent Spanish instead of his usual English. According to CNN's Doug Criss, this is a 16-year-old boy from Atlanta named Reuben Nsemoh - who suffered a concussion during a football game.

New skill

According to Doug, Reuben's parents revealed that the teenager could speak a few words in Spanish, but assured him that he was by no means fluent in the language. The ability came after the teenager had been hit hard on the head for about a month - yet it seems that the boy has already lost some of his fluency and regained his native language, English.

Apparently, trauma has led to the emergence of an extremely rare condition known as Foreign Accent Syndrome - yes, dear reader, this is a real syndrome - in which injuries affect brain regions involved in language functions, affecting speech patterns.

The first case of foreign accent syndrome on record was that of a Norwegian woman who in 1941 during World War II suffered head injuries and woke up speaking with a German accent. Since then, several cases have been reported, such as an Australian woman who woke up from a car accident speaking with a French accent, and a British woman who went to sleep with a huge migraine and woke up with a Chinese accent.