We've got our wires crossed: The bizarre stories of people whose brains have rewired themselves



The human brain: Numerous system which link up and work together

The human brain is the most complex organ in the body and contains 20 billion cells, responsible for everything from dreaming and movement to appetite and emotions.

It consists mainly of grey matter - the brain cells or neurons where information is processed.



It also contains white matter - the nerve fibres which, like electric cables, send out chemical messengers and relay information between the cells.

In fact, the brain contains more nerve fibres than there are wires in the entire international telephone network and sometimes the brain's 'wires' can become crossed, as a result of injury, illness or genetics.

Scientists used to think a brain injury resulted in permanent damage to the brain's functions, but new research suggests this is not necessarily the case.

'When one area of our brain is damaged we now know from scans that the functions of that area are distributed elsewhere,' says Dr Keith Muir, a senior lecturer in neuroscience at Glasgow University.



'That is why after a stroke people sometimes lose the use of their hand or leg then regain it because another area of the brain eventually takes up the job of movement.'

In fact, says Dr Muir, rather than talking about different areas of the brain it is better to think of it as having numerous different systems which link up and work together.

When the brain is injured, the systems learn to link up differently - sometimes with surprising results.

Some people are actually born with this kind of altered wiring. At birth we all have far more brain cells than we need and as we develop there's a period of so-called 'pruning' - when only the connections and brain cells needed and used survive.

In some cases it's thought that this process goes awry - perhaps because of a faulty gene - resulting in cross wiring or extra connections.

Here, we talk to people whose brains have been 'scrambled' as a result of illness or birth.



But far from being a hindrance, some of them believe it is actually beneficial.



The brummie with a French accent

Richard Murray, 32, a financial planning manager, suffered a stroke three years ago and as a result now speaks in a French accent. Richard, from Hereford, is married to Amy, 32, and has two children: Olivia, two, and 17-month-old Finlay.



Richard Murray with his family: His wife Amy helped him to learn to speak again

Richard says: 'Until I had my stroke, I spoke with a broad Brummie accent. Now people assume I am a born-and-bred Frenchman, yet I have only ever been there twice briefly on holiday and speak only the basic French I learnt at school.



The stroke happened nine days after I got back from my honeymoon. Suddenly I had a searing pain in my brain and then I felt numb down my right side. I was fully conscious, but I couldn't speak a word.



'I was taken to hospital and within hours the feeling started to come back in my right leg and arm, but by the next morning I was still only able to grunt and I started to feel really panicky.



'A brain scan showed that the stroke had been caused by a blood clot travelling through my system and lodging in the left side of the brain; this is the area which controls speech. They thought I got the clot after breaking my big toe while on honeymoon.



'Although the clot had been dispersed with drugs, I was warned I might never be able to speak again, which was devastating.



'I had all the vocabulary in my head, but I could not remember physically how to form words. Instead, I had to write everything down.



'After eight days I was discharged from hospital, by which time I had full use of my arms and legs, but I was still mute.



'I was told I needed to start speech therapy as soon as possible, but the wait on the NHS was nine months.



'Luckily, a friend who is a speech therapist agreed to see me once a week and my wife worked with me daily.



'I had to learn how to talk again from scratch. I knew how each word and letter was supposed to sound, but I did not know where to put my tongue or how to force out the words.



'My wife would use a mirror so she could describe to me exactly how my mouth should look when I was making letter sounds.



'Within two weeks I learned four basic words: 'hi, bye, yes and no.'



'Instantly my new accent was discernable. Initially I sounded Italian. My wife was just pleased I was talking again.



'One day I was at the supermarket when the cashier asked me a question. I could only shrug and someone behind me muttered 'bloody foreigner'.



'Slowly I started to talk more. It felt different physically in my mouth to the way it did before the stroke and my accent turned from Italian to French. When I bumped into old friends and started speaking, they thought I was taking the mickey.



'When I went back to work six months later, I visited each client face to face as they wouldn't have believed it was me on the phone.



'Now I can hold a steady, fluent conversation, but I still sound French. The doctors aren't sure if my English accent will ever return. But I really don't mind - having thought I would never speak again, I am grateful just to be able to talk.'

What is happening?

Foreign Language Syndrome is a very rare but recognised medical condition in which, due to a stroke or brain injury, a person starts speaking their mother language but with a foreign accent.



'The power of speech uses many different areas of the brain,' says Dr Keith Muir, a senior lecturer in neuroscience at Glasgow University.



'That's why total speech loss is a common effect of a stroke, because it can cause catastrophic damage to very large areas of the brain.



'It could be that people with this syndrome either regain their speech by using a different part of their brain, or that the effect of the stroke makes their mouth and tongue operate differently, which alters their pronunciation.'



• The Stroke Association helpline 0845 3033 100 and www.stroke.org.uk



The man who can taste words



James Wannerton (right), an IT contractor from Blackpool, has synaesthesia, a condition which means two senses are stimulated at once. For James, 49, hearing or seeing words stimulates his sense of taste.



He says: 'When I hear a word, I actually taste it. Some words taste really nice and some really unpleasant. It's something I can't switch it off. I even dream with the sense of taste strong in my mouth.



'It can be quite distracting, like having ringing in your ears. I've always had it - one of my earliest memories is saying The Lord's Prayer during assemblies when I was four or five and getting loads of different tastes, such as bacon, entering my mouth.



'When I was younger, I would pick my friends on the basis of the way their names tasted.



'For example. I would like people called Robert because the name tasted like strawberry jam sandwiches, whereas the name Gordon made me taste dirt.

'Until my teens, I presumed everyone was the same as me. It was only when I started opening up to girlfriends that I realised I was a bit different.



'In my late teens, my mum admitted she had a far less invasive version than mine. However, she seemed to be really embarrassed talking about it, so I just dropped the subject and I presumed it was just a family trait.



'It wasn't until the mid-Nineties while holidaying in America, that I saw a TV documentary about people like me realised I had a medical condition.



'I then found out about some into synaesthesia at the Maudsley Hospital in London and contacted them ten years ago.



'A brain scan showed that the area processing taste lit up not only when I ate something, as it does for everyone, but also unusually, when I heard words and word sounds.



'When I was at university I found it quite hard to concentrate as the words of lecturers would flood my mouth with flavours.



'That's why I choose to work in information technology, a quiet profession which does not require me to talk or interact much with other people.



'This condition has also affected the types of women I go out with.



'Whereas Barbara or Helen are nice juicy flavours to me, a friend married a women whose name, Colleen, makes me nauseous. I find it hard to say or hear her name as a result.



'Food names don't necessarily bring the taste of the food. For example, the word oyster triggers the taste of chocolate.



'I have actually stopped eating out with other people because their conversation creates so many different tastes in my mouth that it ruins my enjoyment of the food.



'Sometimes my synaesthesia has proved useful - at school it helped me memorise things because I could remember flavours.



'A good example would be the kings and queens of England which were a list of tastes.



'I wouldn't want to be without synaesthesia, but I would like to be without it briefly, so I could understand what other people's lives are like. I imagine it wouldn't be as interesting.'



What is happening?



'People with synaesthesia find that one sense automatically triggers another,' says Dr Jamie Ward, a neuroscientist from the University of Sussex who has written a book on the subject called The Frog Who Croaked Blue.



'The condition, which is often hereditary and affects around one in 20 in the UK to some degree, is caused by extra connections in the areas of the brain which control the senses.



'MRI scans have found that people with synaesthesia develop excess connections, often in the vision area. The most common form is seeing colours when hearing letters.

'They remember things and perceive things in a different way. For example, someone with synaesthesia might think of a phone number as a series of coloured stripes because each number also stimulates a colour in their brain.'



• UK Synaesthesia Association www.uksynaesthesia.com







The obsessive artist

Tommy McHugh, 58, a divorced father of two from Liverpool, was a builder until he had a brain haemorrhage which almost killed him in 2001. Tommy is now a prodigious artist even though he had never picked up a paintbrush before.



Tommy McHugh: From builder to prodigious artist

He says: 'My urge to draw is like an addiction. My brain is so full of ideas for new sculptures or paintings that I struggle to sleep. I never dreamed my life would take this path.



'As a youngster, I was in trouble for fighting and left school at 15. I had never been interested in art or poetry, but the haemorrhage changed all that.



'When it happened, I felt an intense pain in my head which was so bad I vomited. My wife called an ambulance and I was rushed to hospital; a scan found an artery in my brain had burst and there was a bulge in another which looked like it might burst at any minute.



'I immediately had surgery and when I came round after the five-hour operation the world was a completely different place.



'A doctor said my wife was there to see me, but I looked at this woman and had no recollection of her at all. It was really, really frightening.



'My children and my brothers came to see me and with every arrival I thought: "Now, who is this?" The worst part, though, was looking in the mirror and having no recollection of having seen my face before.



'Slowly my kids, who are grown up now, made me laugh, triggering fragments of previous memories. I started to remember them after a couple of weeks.



'About a month after the haemorrhage, the creative urges began. I started writing poetry, but in a manic way. Was it any good? I don't know, but I could fill five exercise books a day. The painting urge came on about two months later.



'I was filing up any spare paper I had with drawings and paintings. Within weeks I wanted to paint more and more and had started painting walls. Now my house looks like one big collage of my work with every surface - even furniture - painted with a face or scene.



'I don't copy anything. I just draw things that come into my mind. I could never paint someone's portrait, for example.



'In one way, I wish this had happened to me when I was 14. I would love to have been able to have a career as an artist, but it has had downsides, too.



'Jan and I split up six months after the haemorrhage. She said she did not know me any more and the obsessive painting scared her. I'd stay up painting until 2 or 3am and then get up at 6am and start again.



'I do wish I could sometimes turn the ideas off. The hospital referred me to a psychiatrist, but he only offered me sleeping pills.



'I don't want to take pills, though. All I take are painkillers for the headaches I get on a fairly regular basis, but I don't want to stop my creative urges, just slow them down a bit.



'I am working with a gallery now and I hope that as well as exhibiting my work people will commission my paintings. That would be magic.



What is happening?



'Tommy's experiences are unusual, but there are other cases of injury to the brain leading to extreme artistic output,' says Dr Ailie Turton, an occupational therapist based in the experimental psychology unit at Bristol University.



'There have been cases of people with dementia who, like Tommy, have damage to the front of the brain, the area that plays a major part in emotion and language.



'There was a 68-year-old man who had shown no previous artistic talent but suddenly became an accomplished painter.



'Our creative urges are driven by many different areas of the brain linked by various networks and it could be that these are somehow enhanced by injury. The brain also has dampening actions to keep impulses and reactions in check and it may be that this response is damaged, which unleashes a manic desire to create art.'

