Headaches...and Accents?

Headaches are the worst. Right when you have piles of work to do, your head is just throbbing with this annoying pain. At this point, you usually decide to stop whatever you’re doing and just take a nap. But have you ever imagined waking up with a foreign accent? This is exactly what happened to a woman in New Castle, U.K who got up one morning with a Jamaican accent (which actually sometimes altered with a Slovenian accent), and a Michigan woman who developed an English accent after a severe migraine. Across the world, individuals who have gone through significant head trauma have developed of all sorts of new accents such as Chinese, Hungarian, French, and British. So what do headaches have to do with foreign accents? It is a condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome. Foreign Accent Syndrome is cause by severe brain injury. It is commonly a consequence of stroke, but can also occur after severe migraines. Significant head trauma can damage the regions of the brain responsible for linguistic functions, and can alter aspects of speech production such as intonation, rhythm, tone, and timing. Thus, an individual still has the same knowledge of the language but the way in which it is produced is changed in a fundamental way. To read more about FAS check this out: http://healthland.time.com/2010/09/16/a-severe-migraine-could-give-you-a-new-accent/