Imagine waking up one morning and speaking with a completely different accent, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t speak with your usual voice. This is what happened to May Pei, a doctor from Australia. As well, another woman from Australia, Susan Carpenter, had a similar experience.

Susan went shopping with her Aunt and in the middle of a sentence her accent suddenly changed. Her Aunt thought she was playing around but soon realized that Susan wasn’t joking. “It was funny for about ten seconds,” said Susan, “until I realized that I couldn’t make the accent go away.”

Oddly enough, both girls accents were Irish. Neither of them have family or friends from Ireland, and neither have ever visited there.

The worse part of this syndrome for these young women is that the people around them think the two women are just trying to get attention. “It’s very hurtful when the people around you don’t understand how real, and awful, this problem is,” said May. “I don’t sound like myself, I don’t feel like myself.”

After hearing about their stories, a famous TV show decided to bring the two women together and try to find out what’s going on. They took them to see Dr. Samuel Parch, a neurologist and brain surgeon. “What both women are experiencing is Foreign Accent Syndrome,” says Dr. Parch.

FAS is a speech disorder. It usually happens after a head injury, stroke, or some other type of damage to the brain. Although it's extremely rare, it's a real condition. Only about 100 people have been diagnosed with this condition since the first known case in 1907.

“It’s a bit of a conundrum,” says Dr. Parch, “because neither of them have had a traumatic head injury or brain surgery, and nothing unusual shows up in the traditional MRT scans.”

But there were some changes to both of them that may have contributed to their syndrome. In the one case, May had recently undergone a minor procedure called a tonsillectomy (removal of the tonsils from the throat entrance). In the second case, Susan suffers from chronic migraines (frequent and serious headaches). So doctor Parch gave both women a neurological scan of the brain.

What he discovered was that the neurons in the language centers of the brain were firing abnormally. “Compared to the normal brain, some neurons were firing too much, and some to little. This condition impairs their ability to control the muscles used to produce speech. So it’s safe to say, these women aren’t trying to fool anyone. This is for real.”