Michal Sklar stood up to introduce a speaker at her high school assembly, sat back down, and the next thing she remembers is a hospital room. It was the day before her seventeenth birthday in October 2010, and the grand mal seizure that put her there has never been explained. Several days into that hospital stay, she noticed something no monitor would catch. The words the doctors and nurses said around her were arriving in her head backward.
A Week of Testing, and Not a Single Answer
Sklar, now 32, told Newsweek she spent close to a week in a New York hospital undergoing an EEG, an MRI, and several other evaluations, then stayed under close medical supervision for months afterward. Nothing accounted for the episode. The seizure was classified as idiopathic, the term clinicians use when no cause can be identified.
By her own account, the reversals alarmed her rather than delighted her. She had just been through a frightening medical event, and now her brain was flipping words. Over time she told a friend, then family, several of whom found the whole thing oddly fitting for someone who had always loved language.
It never faded. She still wakes up with songs running backward in her head, and she flips words for her family as a party trick. She calls it the most useless superpower she could have been handed.
The Private Language She Calls Sdrawkcab
Sklar reverses each word in a sentence while leaving the words themselves in order, so ordinary English comes out as a run of mirrored spellings. She named the result "sdrawkcab." Everyday words arrive instantly. Anything four syllables or longer takes noticeably more effort, and she says supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is beyond her.
She did not tell her medical team while it was happening. There were electrodes on her scalp and a more urgent question on the table. By the time she raised it with her neurologist, the ability had become part of how she thought of herself. She said the neurologist dismissed it. She grabbed papers off the desk to demonstrate how fast she could read in reverse and got no interest in return.
Her family absorbed it faster than her doctors did. She and her husband now use reversed words as a private shorthand, with "snoops" standing in for spoons and "pots" for stop. Her 7-year-old son treats the whole thing as a bragging right.
Backward Speakers Are Rare, but They Exist, and They Have Been Scanned
The scientific literature on people who reverse speech is small, and none of it involves Sklar. It is still the best context available for what she describes.
In 2016, an international team published a study in Scientific Reports on a Serbian family in which a 59-year-old father and one of his daughters could voluntarily and rapidly reverse speech. The mother, the other daughter, and all other living relatives could not. Neither the father nor the daughter reported ever having learned or practiced the skill. EEG recordings suggested the reversal effect happened before the brain integrated the meaning of visually presented backward words. Functional MRI pointed to the left fusiform gyrus as a possible contributor to producing backward speech, and exome sequencing turned up three previously undescribed coding variants in the genes RIC3, RIPK1, and ZBED5. The authors concluded that, in this woman, the ability rested on an extraordinary working memory capacity.
A later paper in Scientific Reports examined structural imaging, diffusion tensor imaging, and resting-state functional connectivity in two expert Spanish-speaking backward speakers. Both beat control participants at reversing words and sentences of varying complexity, and the advantage held even after the researchers controlled for working memory scores, which runs counter to the earlier explanation. Both showed higher mean diffusivity and stronger functional connectivity along the dorsal and ventral language pathways, though only one showed greater grey matter volume under the strictest analysis. The specific locations differed between the two men, which the authors interpreted as individual variability rather than a single shared backward-speech circuit.
The Reason No One Can Say the Seizure Caused It
Sklar's story is a personal account published in the general press, not a documented clinical case. No imaging, testing, or peer-reviewed write-up has linked her seizure to her language processing, and the timing alone does not establish that one produced the other.
The two are plausibly related. Epilepsy and language are genuinely entangled, and seizure activity near the left-hemisphere language cortex can interfere with word retrieval and naming. There are even syndromes in which reading provokes seizures. One case report in the journal Seizure described a 23-year-old man whose generalized tonic-clonic seizures began with visual illusions while he read complicated English text, accompanied by misreading of difficult and foreign words. A companion series of five patients in the same issue reported that the vague visual auras some of these patients describe may represent ictal dyslexia.
But the same literature cuts the other way. The Serbian family developed the trait with no neurological event at all, and the older case reports of acquired backward speech followed neurosurgery or head injury, with very different explanations attached. Sklar was 16 when this began, an age when language and executive systems are still maturing, and she describes herself as a lifelong language enthusiast. Any of that could matter.
What her case does illustrate is how narrow a cognitive change can be. She reports no other deficits. She reads, writes, and speaks English normally, holds a job, raises a child, and simply carries a second, mirrored copy of the language alongside the first.
Anyone who has a first seizure should be evaluated by a physician, and persistent changes in language, memory, or perception afterward are worth mentioning to a neurologist even when they seem harmless or interesting.
Key Questions Answered
What actually happened to Michal Sklar?
She had a grand mal seizure in October 2010, the day before her seventeenth birthday. Several days into her hospital stay, she began processing spoken and written words in reverse. Extensive testing never identified a cause for the seizure.
Does she still have the ability?
Yes. She is 32 now and still reverses words automatically, including song lyrics that surface in her head backward.
Did doctors confirm the seizure caused this?
No. Her neurologist reportedly declined to explore it, and no published clinical workup connects the two. The timing is suggestive but proves nothing.
Is backward speech studied at all?
Yes, though rarely. Published research includes a Serbian family with an apparently inherited version of the trait and imaging studies of two expert backward speakers with measurable differences in brain structure and connectivity.
Can a seizure give someone a new skill?
There is no established evidence for that. Seizures more often disrupt language than enhance it, and the handful of documented backward speakers mostly have no seizure history.
What should someone do after a first seizure?
See a physician for evaluation. Any lasting change in language, memory or perception is worth reporting to a neurologist, even a change that seems benign.
