Logical reasoning and language live in separate parts of the brain.

Losing language does not mean losing the ability to think.

Aphasia is widely mistaken for a loss of intelligence.

In 2024, Frank Muldowney won the lottery. Not the financial kind.

He finally learned, nearly four decades after brain surgery at the age of 19, that he had Wernicke's aphasia. This condition affects language comprehension and production, caused in his case by an arteriovenous malformation that burst in 1985.

"It felt like winning the lottery," he told me, "because my whole life suddenly made sense."

Frank reached out to me recently through LinkedIn. He is currently writing a book about his experience, the first time, he says, he has truly been able to put his thoughts into words. What he shared with me in our written exchange stopped me more than once.

What 1985 Took and What It Didn't

Frank was 19 when the surgery changed his relationship with language. In the weeks and months that followed, words sounded like noise. He couldn't read. The world stopped making sense through language, and so he went somewhere else.

"I went inward to escape the confusion," he said, "and the silence became my friend."

What happened inside that silence is the part most people, including the medical professionals around him at the time, didn't understand.

"I never felt that I had lost my ability to think,"........

© Psychology Today