Automated Discourse Analysis Reveals Thematic Change After Traumatic Brain Injury in Jorge Luis Borges

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can, in rare cases, modify artistic expression. In 1938, Jorge Luis Borges suffered a TBI requiring surgery, with transient aphasia the following months. Soon after, his writing shifted from criollista poetry/essay toward fantastic fiction. This study analyzed his original texts written before and after the injury using automated discourse analysis, asking whether the resulting changes fit mechanisms such as disinhibition, plasticity, or right-hemisphere recruitment. Semi-automated spaCy pipelines generated hypallage and double-negation candidates, manually validated before computing frequencies; shifts were assessed via keyness, semantic fields, topic modeling, and a logistic classifier. The only robust change was thematic: the criollo-suburban universe gave way to the fantastic-metaphysical, confirmed by all four methods (p < .001; 82.5% classification accuracy vs. 52.4% baseline). Markers suggesting right-hemisphere recruitment (hypallage density, associative distance, syntactic dedifferentiation) remained stable. Further markers are under study (other rhetorical figures, metaphor density over time, syntactic evolution) as Spanish-language computational literary resources remain scarce. Analysis thus corroborates a clear thematic shift but finds no right-hemisphere signature so far, an expected limit for edited texts vs. speech.