A 45-YEAR-OLD woman in Arizona, United States, goes to sleep with extreme headaches and wakes up speaking in a foreign accent, according to the Washington Post.
Initially, Michelle Myers began waking up with Irish and Australian accents, but those began to dissipate after a few weeks.
Now, Michelle wakes up with a distinctly British accent and has been doing so for over two years.
Michelle Myers claims she has a rare condition called foreign accent syndrome which causes her to ‘sleep with a headache and wake up sounding like Mary Poppins’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3ykdDgzn4c
The former Texas beauty queen spoke to Arizona’s ABC15 about the dramatic change in her life.
“I have been diagnosed with hemiplegic migraines – meaning my headaches are accompanied by temporary weakness on one side of the body and numbness", she said.
“But doctors aren’t sure how exactly the migraines relate to foreign accent syndrome.”
Foreign accent syndrome is a lesser-known speech disorder in which the patient loses his ability to talk in the native accent following a brain injury. The speech rhythms and pronunciations sound like other accents.
“It’s actually quite dangerous,” Myers said. “It looks just like a stroke, but it’s not a stroke. They don’t know how or what triggers it.”
“People would think it was a joke, saying things like, ‘You sound like a Spice Girl’.
“I was really struggling. I have come to terms with the fact I might sound like this forever. I realise it’s part of me now.”
According to The Sun, Myers can’t pronounce her children’s names the same, has been mistaken for a nanny and asked if she has a green card.
Michelle Myers' story follows a case in 2016 when a Californian woman developed a Scottish accent through foreign accent syndrome.
