Chinese doctors were recently baffled by the curious case of a young woman who suddenly became unable to speak English, a language she had been fluent in.

Last week, Wan Feng, the director of the Department of Neurosurgery at Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital in Guangzhou, China, posted a video of a 24-year-old woman who had suddenly fallen ill during class one day and developed a very curious symptom – the woman had been proficient in English prior to the classroom incident, but after, she could only speak Mandarin and Cantonese. The young woman could still read and understand English perfectly, but for some reason, she could no longer speak the language at all.

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23-year-old Luiz Augusto Márcio Marques stopped growing after undergoing a surgical procedure to remove a very rare and aggressive tumor. Today he looks like a 13-year-old boy.

Luiz, who is better known as Guto in his native city of Passo Fundo, in Southern Brazil, had a perfectly normal life until the age of 7, when he started experiencing excruciating headaches that began manifesting more frequently as time passed. None of the doctors his parents took him to could diagnose his condition correctly, and the headaches started affecting his school activity and his daily life. Some claimed that it was just a virus, while others said that it was a psychological condition, or that he was just making everything up because he was lazy. It was only after the boy suffered a seizure that he was taken to the city hospital where the real cause of his headaches was finally revealed…

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A rare condition called déjà vécu has been causing an 80-year-old man to perceive every event in his life as a previous experience, similar to the time loop described in the movie Groundhog Day.

Can you imagine watching TV and seeing the same thing over and over again, or trying to read a new book only to find yourself looking at the same pages you read the day before? How about driving and seeing the same cars behind you every day, or walking past the same people as you’re strolling down the street? It sounds like an eerie experience worthy of shows like The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, but it’s actually the life of people suffering from an extremely rare condition known as déjà vécu. Believed to be a complication of Alzheimer’s disease, déjà vécu is the persistent impression that any new encounters are just repetitions of previous experiences.

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A 37-year-old father of one from Texas woke up one day ready to go to school, thinking it was the 1990s, after losing the last two decades of his life, including ever marrying his wife and having a daughter.

In July of last year, Daniel Porter, a hearing specialist from Texas woke up in his bed just like any other morning, only something was wrong. A woman who he had never seen before was sleeping next to him, and when he looked in the mirror, an “old and fat” man was looking back at him. Daniel had gotten up thinking it was time to go to school, not knowing that he had graduated high-school nearly two decades before, and that the strange woman in his bed was his wife, with whom he had a 10-year-old daughter.

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44-year-old Niel Kenmuir suffers from aphantashia, a rare and strange medical condition that prevents him from visualizing things in his head.

Niel first realized that there was something different about his brain when he was in primary school. He had trouble falling asleep at night, so his step-father told him to close his eyes and visualize a flock of sheep and count them as they jump over a fence, one by one. The problem was he couldn’t see anything when he closed his eyes, no sheep, no fence, nothing. Later on, he would discover that he had a blind mind’s eye, which means he cannot visualize anything, not even the face of loved ones.

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Zolpidem is a sedative from the imidazopyridine class of drugs that is most commonly used to help people fall asleep faster. But, in rare cases, this common drug can actually restore function to damaged brains.

There is a reason why zolpidem is sometimes referred to as the “Lazarus Drug”. If you give this pill to someone with brain damage, in 5% to 6% of cases something miraculous happens. In most cases, the changes are minor. People’s speech improves slightly, the frequency of muscle spasms is reduced, they have less difficulty moving, but in some rare cases, a pill can even bring people back from vegetative states, allowing them speak and move as they did before suffering brain damage. The problem is that these positive effects are gone as soon as the drug wears off, and scientists have yet to discover why some patients with brain damage react this way to zolpidem.

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Scientists at Johns Hopkins University recently reported the strange case of a man’s whose rare degenerative brain disease left him unable to distinguish basic numbers from 2 to 9.

After studying an engineering geologist diagnosed with a rare degenerative brain disease called corticobasal syndrome for eight years, researchers published a study which they claim suggests that a brain response to a picture or a word does not necessarily mean that person is aware of it. The protagonist of their research had suffered neurological damage to such an extent that he could not distinguish or reproduce numbers between 2 and 9, nor pictures or words with such digits embedded in them. And yet, electroencephalography (EEG) results showed that his brain was able to properly identify all pictures and words, even id he wasn’t aware of it.

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A year and a half ago, Caitlin Little, a sophomore at Southeast Guilford High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, suffered a concussion during a cross-country practice which left her with a rare form of amnesia. All of her new memories are erased each night, so every morning she wakes up thinking it’s October 2017.

Caitlin’s case sounds a lot like the plot of hit romantic comedy 50 First Dates, in which Drew Barrymore’s character was involved in a serious car accident which left her unable to create new memories after that terrible event, causing her to wake up every morning thinking it was the day of of the accident. In 2004, when 50 First Dates Came Out, the amnesia Barrymore’s character was suffering from was nothing more than a fictional condition called ‘Goldberg’s Syndrome’, and one clinical neuropsychologist even wrote an article about it, claiming that it “bears no relation to any known neurological or psychiatric condition”.  However, several real-life cases of short-term memory resetting have been reported since then, and today that once fictional condition is a medically-recognized disorder known as anterograde amnesia.

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