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7:49am July 28, 2015
[Uhura sits in Sickbay in front of a computer playing educational tapes, as Nurse Chapel looks on.  Uhura is speaking Swahili, according to the captions.]From Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki:In conventions, Nichelle Nichols frequently tells a story of getting into a dispute with director Marc Daniels over the filming of this episode.  As it had already been established that Uhura’s first language was Swahili, Nichols believed that, after her mind was erased, Uhura would revert to her first language.  However, as Nichols herself did not speak Swahili, Daniels wanted Uhura to just speak English.  Nichols refused to, telling Daniels, “Nichelle Nichols doesn’t speak Swahili, but Uhura does!”  Gene Roddenberry was eventually brought in to settle the dispute, and he sided with Nichols.  A linguist specializing in Swahili was then brought in to write the few lines of Swahili that are spoken in the episode.Mind you Uhura is so badass that it only took a few days at most after getting her memory partially wiped, to re-educate herself using library tapes, starting from “See spot run” type stuff, and going all the way up to college level.  And all in English, which was her second language.  (In this episode she spoke Swahili when English got too confusing.)  She got her brain wiped for singing, which a visiting machine thought demonstrated that she was imperfect and irrational and deserved to be erased for (and sexist jokes were made :-/ ).  Someone distracted the machine before it could completely finish erasing her memory.I had to do something surprisingly similar when I got out of the hospital once after being delirious for five weeks (and continuing to have milder delirium after I left).  I could read better than she could at first, but I still had to start with picture books and work my way up through children’s books of all levels and into adult books, and then Coursera classes, to get my mind working again.  It’s grueling and exhausting, and the idea she managed that whole progression within, at most, a few days time, is nothing less than amazing.  (And suggests to me that like with me, it wasn’t that the memories were totally gone, but rather that they were cognitive processes that were rusty and submerged and needed to be called out again through repetition and practice.  Of course, science fiction’s idea of what can be done to brains, and what can actually be done to brains, are two different things.)

[Uhura sits in Sickbay in front of a computer playing educational tapes, as Nurse Chapel looks on.  Uhura is speaking Swahili, according to the captions.]

From Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki:

In conventions, Nichelle Nichols frequently tells a story of getting into a dispute with director Marc Daniels over the filming of this episode.  As it had already been established that Uhura’s first language was Swahili, Nichols believed that, after her mind was erased, Uhura would revert to her first language.  However, as Nichols herself did not speak Swahili, Daniels wanted Uhura to just speak English.  Nichols refused to, telling Daniels, “Nichelle Nichols doesn’t speak Swahili, but Uhura does!”  Gene Roddenberry was eventually brought in to settle the dispute, and he sided with Nichols.  A linguist specializing in Swahili was then brought in to write the few lines of Swahili that are spoken in the episode.

Mind you Uhura is so badass that it only took a few days at most after getting her memory partially wiped, to re-educate herself using library tapes, starting from “See spot run” type stuff, and going all the way up to college level.  And all in English, which was her second language.  (In this episode she spoke Swahili when English got too confusing.)  She got her brain wiped for singing, which a visiting machine thought demonstrated that she was imperfect and irrational and deserved to be erased for (and sexist jokes were made :-/ ).  Someone distracted the machine before it could completely finish erasing her memory.

I had to do something surprisingly similar when I got out of the hospital once after being delirious for five weeks (and continuing to have milder delirium after I left).  I could read better than she could at first, but I still had to start with picture books and work my way up through children’s books of all levels and into adult books, and then Coursera classes, to get my mind working again.  It’s grueling and exhausting, and the idea she managed that whole progression within, at most, a few days time, is nothing less than amazing.  (And suggests to me that like with me, it wasn’t that the memories were totally gone, but rather that they were cognitive processes that were rusty and submerged and needed to be called out again through repetition and practice.  Of course, science fiction’s idea of what can be done to brains, and what can actually be done to brains, are two different things.)

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