We are given five senses with which to perceive the world,  that’s what we’ve got to go on. After coma, I was provoked to investigate consciousness. In the absence of an accepted definition, consciousness might be described as localized perception, experience, and memory, where identity emerges.

I lost mine in coma, by my research online some people didn’t. For me to come out speaking German makes me wonder. Medicine calls this language phenomena of coma foreign accent syndrome, or in cases like mine of language switching, medical xenoglossy. When I came out I only spoke German, they say I was fluent. According to experts, the brain bypasses the damaged English route to find a clearer path in the German. That explanation doesn’t account for TBI victims who wake to speak previously unknown foreign languages. I couldn’t speak German very well before coma.

The hard problem of consciousness…