One morning in October 2010, Michal Sklar stood in front of her fellow students at a school assembly in New York. She introduced the guest speaker, returned to her seat, and sat down.
That is where her memory of the morning stops.
The next thing she remembers is being in a hospital.
Sklar, who was just one day away from turning 17, had experienced a seizure. According to an account she later shared with Newsweek, she spent nearly a week in the hospital undergoing medical tests, including an EEG and an MRI.
Doctors were unable to identify a clear cause for what had happened.
But while the medical team was trying to understand the seizure, Sklar began noticing something unexpected about the way her mind was handling language.
Words had suddenly become remarkably easy for her to reverse.
Not simply words written on a page. When people spoke to her, she found that she could mentally rearrange the letters and process the words backward.
More than a decade later, she says the unusual ability remains.
The intriguing question is whether the seizure had anything to do with it.
Science does not yet give us a simple answer.
An Ability She Says Wasn’t There Before
Within days of the seizure, Sklar noticed that reversing ordinary words required remarkably little effort.
She was not reversing entire sentences by changing the order of their words. Instead, she was reversing the letters within individual words.
Take the word “backwards.”
It becomes “sdrawkcab.”
Sklar eventually began referring to her unusual form of language by that reversed name.
What made the experience particularly strange was that the process did not always seem entirely deliberate. She has described waking up with songs running through her mind, something familiar to almost everyone, except that in her case the words could appear reversed.
Common words can apparently be transformed almost instantly, while particularly long or complex ones may require more time.
Today it can look like an entertaining linguistic trick. At first, however, Sklar found the experience frightening. She had just experienced an unexplained neurological event, and now her mind appeared to be doing something it had never done before.
There Is an Important Missing Piece in the Story
Sklar did not immediately tell her doctors about the ability.
At the time, physicians were understandably focused on determining why a previously healthy teenager had experienced a seizure. She herself apparently did not know whether the strange change in her language processing was medically significant.
She first shared it with people close to her.
When she eventually demonstrated the ability to her neurologist, she says it did not lead to a dedicated neurological investigation.
That matters when interpreting her story.
There are no publicly available neuropsychological assessments showing her performance before and after the seizure. Nor is there, as far as publicly reported information indicates, brain imaging specifically examining what happens while Sklar reverses words.
What we have is her account that she first became aware of the ability shortly after the seizure.
That makes the timing fascinating.
It does not establish causation.
Backward Speech Isn’t Just an Internet Curiosity
Although Sklar’s particular story remains unexplained, exceptional backward-language abilities have been studied scientifically.
In 1982, researchers Nelson Cowan, Lewis Leavitt, Dominic Massaro and Raymond Kent published a study of a remarkably fluent backward speaker in the Journal of Speech and Hearing Research.
The participant could reverse speech segments with exceptional speed. The researchers found that his performance offered clues about how linguistic information can be represented and manipulated mentally.
This is important because reversing language is considerably more complicated than simply “seeing” a word backward.
A person must retain information long enough to reorganize it, keep track of the sequence and then produce the altered form correctly. Depending on the strategy being used, the brain may be manipulating phonological information—the sounds that make up speech—or orthographic information related to written letters.
For most of us, doing that rapidly with increasingly complicated words becomes difficult very quickly.
For a very small number of people, it can become astonishingly effortless.
Scientists Have Watched the Brain Reverse Words
Neuroimaging research has provided another clue about what this unusual task demands from the brain.
In a study published in Brain and Language, researchers used functional MRI while participants mentally reversed spoken words.
The task recruited a network of brain regions rather than one isolated “backward language center.” Areas associated with language processing were involved, but additional activity appeared in regions associated with holding and manipulating information.
The researchers noted parallels between reversing verbal information and other forms of mental manipulation, including processes related to working memory and mental rotation.
Consider what your brain has to accomplish.
You hear a word. Its sequence has to be maintained long enough for the elements to be reorganized. The new sequence then has to be constructed accurately and, if required, spoken aloud.
Try doing that immediately with a long unfamiliar word and the cognitive load becomes obvious.
Yet some individuals can perform the transformation at extraordinary speed.
One Exceptional Backward Speaker Was Studied With EEG, fMRI and Genetics
An especially revealing case was published in Scientific Reports in 2016.
Researchers conducted a multidisciplinary investigation of a woman from a Serbian family who could voluntarily produce backward speech rapidly and with remarkable accuracy.
Unlike a casual demonstration of the skill, the investigation involved psychological testing, EEG, functional MRI and genetic analysis.
The results pointed toward several neural processes involved in the unusual performance. Researchers observed activity associated with reversing words and maintaining information in working memory, while neuroimaging implicated regions including parts of the prefrontal, parietal and fusiform systems.
One particularly interesting feature was the participant’s exceptional working-memory capacity.
That finding offers a useful way of thinking about backward speech. Rather than representing a mysterious “reverse language” module hidden somewhere in the brain, exceptional performance may depend on unusually efficient interaction among systems that normally handle language, sequencing and working memory.
This research does not explain what happened to Sklar.
It does, however, establish that extraordinary backward-language performance is a phenomenon that can be examined scientifically.
Seizures Really Can Interact With Language Networks
This brings us back to the most compelling part of Sklar’s story: the seizure.
Language is not controlled by a single tiny location in the brain. Speaking, understanding speech, reading, naming objects and retrieving words depend on distributed networks involving multiple cortical regions.
Some of these networks overlap with areas affected by certain forms of epilepsy.
Temporal lobe epilepsy, for example, can be associated with difficulties retrieving words. Research involving people with temporal lobe epilepsy has demonstrated disruptions in broader networks involved in naming and language processing.
There is also a group of childhood neurological disorders collectively described as the epilepsy-aphasia spectrum. In these conditions, abnormal electrical activity in the brain is associated with significant disturbances of language abilities.
These disorders are not equivalent to Sklar’s experience and should not be used as an explanation for her case.
They illustrate something more fundamental: abnormal electrical activity in the brain can interact with the networks responsible for language.
Usually, however, the clinical concern is a loss or disruption of function.
The idea that a neurological event might instead be followed by an unusual new ability is much rarer—and considerably more difficult to explain.
Can New Talents Appear After Changes to the Brain?
There is another phenomenon that inevitably comes up when stories like Sklar’s are discussed: acquired savant syndrome.
Savant abilities are usually associated with extraordinary performance in a narrow area such as calculation, music, art, memory or calendar computation. Most discussions concern abilities associated with developmental conditions.
Rare reports, however, describe people developing exceptional abilities following injury or disease affecting the central nervous system.
Neurologist Darold Treffert, who studied savant syndrome extensively, described acquired cases in which previously typical individuals demonstrated striking new abilities following neurological events.
The phenomenon remains unusual, and its mechanisms are not fully understood.
Most importantly, the existence of acquired savant syndrome does not mean that every new ability noticed after a neurological event should be classified this way.
There is no publicly reported evidence that Sklar has been diagnosed with acquired savant syndrome.
Applying that label to her on the basis of her story alone would go beyond the evidence.
Did the Seizure Somehow “Unlock” the Ability?
It is an irresistible explanation.
It is also one that science cannot currently confirm.
According to Sklar’s account, the sequence of events is straightforward: she experienced a seizure and shortly afterward discovered that she could reverse words with unusual ease.
But temporal sequence is not proof of biological cause.
Perhaps the neurological event changed something about the way her language networks functioned. Perhaps she already possessed an unusual aptitude for manipulating language but had never encountered a reason to discover it. Perhaps the experience surrounding her hospitalization caused her to pay attention to a cognitive ability that had previously gone unnoticed.
There may be other explanations entirely.
Without detailed testing from before the seizure, there is no baseline against which researchers could objectively compare her later performance.
And, of course, nobody would have had any reason to perform specialized backward-language testing on a healthy 16-year-old before an unexpected medical event.
That leaves researchers with an intriguing story but an incomplete neurological record.
Neuroplasticity Is Real, but It Isn’t a Hidden-Superpower Switch
Stories about unusual abilities appearing after neurological events are frequently attributed to “neuroplasticity.”
The concept is genuine, but it is often stretched far beyond what neuroscience actually demonstrates.
Neuroplasticity refers broadly to the nervous system’s ability to change its organization and function in response to experience, learning, environmental demands or injury. Neural connections can strengthen or weaken, and networks can sometimes reorganize as the brain adapts.
This capacity is one of the reasons people can learn complex new skills and why some patients can regain functions after neurological injury.
It does not mean that seizures routinely unlock dormant genius or that every human brain contains extraordinary abilities waiting for the right neurological event to release them.
There is no scientific evidence for such a simple mechanism.
Rare cases are scientifically interesting precisely because they are unusual and because they may reveal something about how flexible—and how complicated—the human nervous system really is.
What Once Frightened Her Became Part of Everyday Life
Over time, Sklar’s relationship with the ability changed.
What initially felt unsettling eventually became something she could enjoy. According to her account, backward words have even found their way into her family’s everyday language, and her son regards his mother’s unusual talent as something worth telling his friends about.
She has also demonstrated the ability publicly, inviting people to challenge her with words to reverse.
Sklar has jokingly described it as perhaps the “most useless superpower.”
From a neuroscience perspective, however, it is anything but useless.
Cases involving exceptional cognitive abilities can provide researchers with unusual opportunities to investigate how ordinary mental processes work. Someone who performs a difficult cognitive operation exceptionally well can sometimes reveal just as much about the brain as someone who has lost the ability to perform it.
The Mystery Is More Interesting Than a Simple Explanation
Michal Sklar’s story does not prove that a seizure can suddenly give someone an extraordinary linguistic talent.
But that does not make her experience scientifically uninteresting.
We know that seizures can affect cognitive and language networks. We know that the brain is capable of functional reorganization. We know that exceptionally fluent backward speakers exist and that researchers have identified measurable cognitive and neural characteristics associated with their abilities.
And medical literature contains rare reports of striking talents emerging after neurological changes.
What we do not know is whether those pieces belong to the same puzzle in Sklar’s case.
Perhaps the seizure really did alter the way her brain manipulates language. Perhaps an unusual ability was already present and remained undiscovered until that period of her life. Without dedicated neurological testing, the distinction may never be possible to establish.
That uncertainty is important.
There is no need to turn Sklar’s experience into a story about a seizure magically creating a “superpower.” The reality is more compelling: more than a decade after an unexplained neurological event, she can perform a complex manipulation of language with an ease most people do not possess—and science cannot yet tell us exactly why.
Sometimes the most fascinating thing about the human brain is not what we have explained.
It is what we still cannot.
Sources
Newsweek — Michal Sklar’s account of her teenage seizure and subsequently discovered backward-language ability.
Cowan N., Leavitt L.A., Massaro D.W., Kent R.D. — A Fluent Backward Talker, Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 1982.
Rudner M., Rönnberg J., Hugdahl K. — Reversing Spoken Items—Mind Twisting Not Tongue Twisting, Brain and Language, 2005.
Preković S. et al. — Multidisciplinary Investigation Links Backward-Speech Trait and Working Memory Through Genetic Mutation, Scientific Reports, 2016.
García A.M. et al. — research on the neurocognitive characteristics of expert backward speakers, Scientific Reports, 2020.
Trebuchon-Da Fonseca A. et al. — research examining neural networks associated with word-finding difficulties in temporal lobe epilepsy, Brain, 2009.
MedlinePlus Genetics — Epilepsy-Aphasia Spectrum.
Epilepsy Foundation — information on epilepsy, language and word-retrieval difficulties.
Treffert D.A. — The Savant Syndrome: An Extraordinary Condition. A Synopsis: Past, Present, Future, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2009.