By Kavita Varma-White

At the age of 5, my son Jayan had a routine set of dental x-rays, which showed a disturbing fact.

He possessed not one, not two, but three sets of front teeth. There were his baby teeth, and his permanent teeth, and in between, an extra set. A bonus pair, if you will.

I reacted the way any parent would upon discovering your child has an extra body part. I freaked. “He has what?!” I yelled at my husband, who had taken him to the appointment. (Having a general fear of dentistry, I avoid going whenever possible.)

Humans are normally born with 20 baby teeth, and have 32 permanent teeth. As it turns out, Jayan is the proud owner of supernumerary teeth, which are teeth additional to the regular number of chompers and can be found in almost any region of the horse shoe-shaped dental arch. They are most common in the central incisors, or front teeth.

By Brian Alexander

For as long as she could remember a 60-year-old British woman, known only as KH, has been unable to recognize voices, not even the voice of her own daughter. Unless she sees the face of the person speaking, she often has no idea who is talking to her. If her daughter calls on the phone, or an unseen colleague from work says something to her, it’s as if she’s hearing the voice for the first time.

Except when Sean Connery speaks.

by Diane Mapes

A six-fingered spy seems a natural fit for a James Bond film, right in keeping with other odd-bodied henchmen like the metal-mouthed giant Jaws or Tee Hee, the assassin with a hook-for-a-hand.

But the supernumerary appearing in the latest 007 adventure “Quantum of Solace” is no quirky Bond villain. She’s the new Bond beauty Gemma Arterton, a 22-year-old British actress who was born with six fingers on each hand, a condition known as polydactyly.

Polydactyly, which can run in families, occurs in approximately 1 in 1,000 children and can involve either multiple toes and/or multiple fingers, everything from small skin buds next to the pinkie to two fingernails on one finger to fully-functioning extra digits to fingers or thumbs split into a Y-shape.

According to Dr. Terry Light, a hand surgeon and chairman of the department of orthopedic surgery and rehabilitation at Loyola University Medical Center, polydactyly and syndactyly, the webbing or fusing of fingers and toes, are the two most common congenital hand anomalies seen in the U.S.

By Mark Leyner and Dr. Billy Goldberg

Imagine, for instance, if an accidental bop on the head changed your accent from the grating stridence of Fran Drescher to the dulcet, euphonious tones of, say, Kate Winslet. Or, if you’re a man, a whack to the forehead transformed your speech from something out of Homer Simpson's pie-hole to the adorably urbane voice of Stewie Griffin from “The Family Guy.”

An equally bizarre voice change happened for real to a woman from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Recent newspaper reports and a cable TV show featured CindyLou Romberg, who had a serious brain injury after falling out of a moving car in 1981 and splitting her head from front to back. Once her awful headaches and lingering back pain abated, she resumed a normal life as a caregiver and motorcycle enthusiast. Until her back started bothering her again about a year ago.

After visiting a local chiropractor, she soon began speaking gibberish. When Romberg eventually began speaking normally again, she had a German accent, tinged with what some friends thought was French or Russian. This from an American woman who had never studied a foreign language, nor been to any foreign country, except Canada.