Cool Thing Of The Day: Learning A Language While Comatose

File under: "No, I guess we still have no idea of the capacity or the capabilities of our brains."

According to a Telegraph story, a 13 year old Croatian girl slipped into a coma, and came out of it a day later speaking fluent German.

The girl, from the southern town of Knin, had only just started studying German at school and had been reading German books and watching German TV to become better, but was by no means fluent, according to her parents.

Since waking up from her 24 hour coma however, she has been unable to speak Croatian, but is able to communicate perfectly in German.

Some are calling it a miracle, and while I too am impressed by this remarkable event, I actually find it frustrating, as it makes me wonder -- she'd been studying German, so was she storing this latent language fluency in her brain somewhere, and it took a blow to the head to release it? And how can we surface the human brain's incredible capacity for storage, processing and recall without it taking a near-death experience?