Non, je ne parle pas français

So, just to let everyone know, one of my favorite shows is Grey’s Anatomy. On one of the episode of this latest season, one of the doctors had a brain tumor. As most people are aware, brain tumors are not easily removed. However, because this a made-up show, this tumor was obviously easily removed. Anyway, when this doctor woke up, something strange happened. This English-speaking doctor woke up speaking in fluent French.  

Like I said, this show is made-up, so I didn’t really think anything of it. This all changed when Coral and I googled weird and rare diseases. I stumbled upon Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS). Upon further research into this syndrome, I found a more recent case that was reported in 2016. A young soccer player in Atlanta ended up in a coma after being kicked in the head. Once he finally woke up from his coma, he began to speak Spanish fluently. In both the made-up show and this real case, both the kid and the doctor knew little of the now fluent language.

Foreign Accent Syndrome was first described by the French neurologist Pierre Marie in 1907. This rare syndrome is usually caused by damage to the brain. These damages can range from a stroke, brain hemorrhaging, head trauma, or blunt or sharp trauma to the skull that cause concussions. Another damage to the brain that has led to foreign accent syndrome is multiple sclerosis. Most sufferers of this syndrome experience changes in tone of speech, changes in the movement of one’s tongue and jaw activity while speaking, the use of words not common in their native language, and also sentence distortion. These symptoms have fascinated doctors as patients will wake up speaking with a different accent or even speaking another language. 

As this syndrome is so rare, doctors really do not have a clear explanation of how or why this happens to patients.  For sufferers, patients can go to speech therapy or counseling to get back to their native tongue. Dr. Karen Croot stated that “speech is one of the most complicated things we do”. She went on to explain there are a lot of motor areas in the brain that are involved in speech and therefore, if one of those parts in our brains is damaged, it could cause all sorts of things to go wrong.

Studies have been conducted and scientists have noticed sufferers who acquired FAS through having a stroke, the left-hemisphere Broca’s area, pre-motor and motor areas, and the basal ganglia of the brain are the damaged areas. However, other cases have reported that damage is in right-hemisphere, which is known to have a key role in speech prosody.

Like I stated previously, there is still more research that is needed to be conducted to determine exactly what is happening in the brain and exactly why. So, my advice for y’all is to live a healthy life and avoid brain injuries at all times unless you want to wake up with a cool accent.

Sources: http://leader.pubs.asha.org/article.aspx?articleid=2278208 https://www.utdallas.edu/research/FAS/                                          http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/24/health/teen-spanish-new-language-trnd/index.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_accent_syndrome#History                           http://syndrome.org/foreign-accent-syndrome/