New York woman suffered a grand mal seizure as a teen. Then she reportedly woke up with a ‘superpower’

A New York woman suffered a grand mal seizure as a teenager. Then she discovered she could process words backward, a rare ability she now demonstrates on TikTok. Michal Sklar, who posts as Michal Speaks Sdrawkcab (@momentsofmichal), was 16 when she experienced the unexplained seizure in October 2010, just one day before her 17th birthday.

According to an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Sklar was serving as her high school’s student body president and helping with an assembly when she suddenly lost consciousness. Sklar does not remember the seizure itself. Her classmates later filled her in on what happened.

Sklar spent nearly a week in the hospital and underwent an EEG, MRI, and other evaluations. Doctors ultimately classified the grand mal seizure as idiopathic, meaning they could not determine its cause. Sklar told PEOPLE that she had no previous history of seizures and has not experienced another one since.

But the seizure was followed by something doctors could not explain.

While she remained hospitalized, Sklar noticed that the words doctors and nurses spoke seemed to arrive in her mind backward. “My mind just kept naturally processing what the doctors and nurses were saying in reverse,” Sklar told PEOPLE. The unusual ability did not disappear after she left the hospital. Instead, Sklar gradually learned to control it.

Today, Sklar can speak, read, and write words backward. She told PEOPLE that familiar words of up to about four syllables can come to her automatically without consciously rearranging them. Longer words require more effort. “Most everyday words and phrases happen instantly,” she said.

Her ability does have limits. Sklar says she cannot effortlessly reverse extremely long words such as “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” She also does not reverse an entire sentence letter by letter. Instead, she reverses the sounds within individual words while keeping the words in their original order.

That distinction has become part of the discussion surrounding her viral TikTok videos. One recent video about the story behind her ability reportedly attracted more than 4 million views. Sklar has also given the ability a name: “sdrawkcab,” which is “backwards” spelled backward. She has described it as a “useless superpower.”

The phenomenon has attracted researchers, although science has not established why Sklar developed it after her seizure. Oxford Brookes University researcher Dianne Newbury contacted Sklar in 2017 after learning about her ability.

The following year, researcher Hayley Moutford spent a day testing Sklar with brain exercises, word-reversal tasks and logic puzzles. Research into backward speech offers some insight into the brain processes involved, but it does not establish what caused Sklar’s ability to emerge after her seizure.

A 2016 study published in Scientific Reports examined a Serbian family in which a father and daughter could voluntarily speak backward. Researchers found evidence that the ability involved working memory and identified activity in brain regions associated with language and visual word processing.

The study also identified genetic variants that researchers said might contribute to the trait, although the authors did not establish a specific genetic cause. A separate study of two expert backward speakers, published in 2020, found differences in gray matter and functional connectivity in brain networks involved in phonological and linguistic processing.

Now, Sklar’s says her unique ability has become part of her family’s life. Sklar has said she and her husband sometimes use backward words as a kind of shared language. She hopes researchers will learn more about why her brain began processing language differently after that 2010 seizure.