Aphasia robs people of their language skills while leaving their minds intact
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks is a great book on the topic.
Anecdotally, I've had it (visual aphasia), in a severely dehydrated state (vomiting for a week in 40 degree heat is no joke), I couldn't identify objects (taps = cat) and things were hard to identify as coherent wholes, more a bunch of strange parts, and was hallucinating badly to boot. Couldn't even begin to put words together so can't comment on verbal. Horrible experience but even at the time some part of me that was clinging to sanity was going "hmm, interesting".
Since you describe this as "heat", I'll note for the record that 40 centigrade is 104 Fahrenheit.
That must've been a strange feeling.
Then again when I was nine my mother caught me sticking knitting needles in my eye, trying to replicate newton's experiments, so.
Aphasia -Aphasia is an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write. (from the National Aphasia Association)
Brain Scientist Describes her stroke, with humor and insight.
This is one of the best rated TED talks. I hear she spent 6 months practicing. And it shows.
Link to curated version (skips the boring part :)
http://www.bungalowsoftware.com/stroke/how-a-stroke-feels.ht...
... and yet it is behind a paywall. I'd be fine with it if I knew that, by paying, I would support her. But I'm guessing this is not the case.
I like to say : Aphasia is the deficit that has everyone not talking.
When we try to relearn language as an adult we find out just how complicated speech & language are.
But, boy, when it's gone you realize how valuable it is.
Kind of tangentially related, but an interesting adventure into things I've never really spent time to think about. https://vimeo.com/145882693
Aphasia (ancient greek for "without speech") is just a condition of impairment in language production. By definition, it can't directly harm you, or do anything other than "affect your language".
It is caused by brain injuries; they can hurt you.
Stroke is a very common cause of aphasia, of course, but as our populations age (and as the causes of death and disaility that strike earlier are eliminated), the many varieties of age related dementia are making themselves known.
1. http://www.aphasia.org/aphasia-resources/primary-progressive...
Also really sad. Anyone who's had a degenerative disease in their family knows how hard this can be.
Sometimes they don't.
My friend's grandmother had a stroke some months back; she lost the ability to talk. She can easily demonstrate that she understands what you say, but she can't talk.
There is a passage in The Language Instinct about a man who had a stroke, and lost the ability to talk. He recovered. And he described the experience -- of finding himself in difficulty, knowing something was wrong, and calling out to his wife for help... when no words came out.
It's one of the most horrifying things I can think of. :/
So, you could communicate with hand gestures, pictures, etc.
One technique is a communication board, with lots of pictures. The person with aphasia would point to the picture of concept they want to communicate.
And there are augmentative communication devices, but they are ( in my experience) not terribly useful for an adult w/ aphasia.