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A Dutch teenager completely forgot his native tongue after waking up from surgery and could only speak English, doctors have revealed. The unidentified 17-year-old boy, thought to be from Maastricht, was in hospital for a knee operation following an injury during a football match. But after he awoke from the anesthesia, he was unable to speak or understand any of the medics, who were speaking in Dutch. Instead, he was only able to talk in English — a language he had only been learning at school and never used outside of the classroom. The boy also failed to recognise his...

Imagine going to sleep and waking up sounding British. It's a real thing, and it happened to a Valley woman who has never even left the country. "Everybody only sees or hears Mary Poppins," said Michelle Myers, a mom of seven who lives in Buckeye. Myers is a former Texas beauty queen who has never even left the United States. Three times in the past seven years, Myers has gone to sleep with blinding headaches only to wake up with a different accent. The first time it was Irish. The second time was Australian. Both incidents lasted about a week....

Myers says she has been diagnosed with Foreign Accent Syndrome. The disorder typically occurs after strokes or traumatic brain injuries damage the language center of a person's brain — to the degree that their native language sounds like it is tinged with a foreign accent, according to the Center for Communication Disorders at the University of Texas at Dallas.

I have three wonderful daughters – two teenagers and one young adult. I can hardly imagine anything more horrible than the prospect that one of them might one day enter therapy for help with some common psychological problem such as anxiety, insomnia or depression and, at the end of that process, accuse me of childhood sexual abuse on the basis of "recovered" memories. Even though I would know with absolute certainty that such allegations were untrue, the chances are that nothing I could say or do would convince my accusers of this. > The problem is that there is very...