10 Stories Of How Brain Damage Endowed People With Great Talent

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10 Stories Of How Brain Damage Endowed People With Great Talent
10 Stories Of How Brain Damage Endowed People With Great Talent
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The brain is a complex organ. Scientists have been trying to understand him for years. However, they have not yet managed to solve all the mysteries associated with the brain

10 stories of how brain damage has endowed people with great talent - brain, lightning, car accident, trauma, savant syndrome, genius, talent, artist
10 stories of how brain damage has endowed people with great talent - brain, lightning, car accident, trauma, savant syndrome, genius, talent, artist

Doctors often witness brain injuries. In such cases, people often noticed some significant changes in their personality. In most cases, these changes were negative, such as depression, anxiety, etc., but in rare cases, the personalities of some people changed forever.

They discovered in themselves unusual abilities that they never possessed before the injury. This condition is also called "Acquired savant syndrome" … We bring you 10 such true stories of how brain damage has endowed people with talent in one area or another.

1. Became an artist after an accident

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Scott Mele, 38, was a car salesman in California and was once driving through an intersection and was hit by another car driving at 70 mph. Scott was taken to the hospital, but no significant injuries were found there, and a few hours later he was allowed to go home. However, he still received a craniocerebral injury, although its consequences came to light only four months later (!).

Once Scott woke up with a strong feeling of loss and anxiety, and this feeling grew in him every day. As he drove past a paint store, he suddenly realized that he wanted to buy paint and start painting.

Before the accident, Scott painted at the level of a kalyak-malyak, that is, like an inept child, and then suddenly he began to create something very bright, beautiful and expressive. When he told the doctors about this, they revealed that he had atypical acquired savant syndrome.

2. Became an artist after an unsuccessful operation

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35-year-old John Sarkin went to the hospital in 1989 due to severe tinnitus. He was prescribed brain surgery, but during it John suffered a cerebellar hemorrhage and a stroke.

When he woke up after the operation, he could not hear with one ear, his vision also suffered, as well as the motor functions of the body. Doctors told John that they had to remove some parts of his brain.

It was soon revealed that John's personality had changed. He began to feel like a different person, he developed new habits and suddenly wanted to draw. In his head, John saw vivid pictures and he was eager to portray them in reality. His paintings were saturated with colorful tones and had an almost cartoonish style. Now his work is regularly published in various magazines and galleries.

3. Transformed into a mathematical genius

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In 2002, Jason Padgett was hanging out with two friends at a karaoke bar. At some point, he decided to go home, but did not manage to leave the bar when two drunk men attacked him and severely beat him, inflicting many blows on the head.

When friends brought him to the hospital, he developed a concussion and bleeding from a kidney. However, his condition was found to be stable and he soon returned home. Then over the next few days, Jason realized that his attitude began to change.

At first, he developed obsessive-compulsive disorder, he was afraid to go outside and constantly washed his hands for fear of germs. Then his visual perception of the world changed. He began to see everything as if in a pixel display, and even the water flowing from the tap was no longer smooth and even for him.

One day, while surfing the Internet, Jason accidentally saw mathematical equations with fractals and they interested him so much that he began to study them, and then showed his own fractals to college physics and he was so impressed that he advised Jason to go to college.

During his studies, Jason seriously immersed himself in physics and mathematics. At the moment, he has drawn over a thousand fractals and sells them on his website. He also wrote a book about himself "Struck by genius".

4. Got a phenomenal memory

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Daniel Tammet was born in England in 1979. As a child, he suffered from epileptic seizures and was prescribed medication. The pills helped, but Tammet's brain suffered and this somehow affected his memory. He began to see and feel numbers. In his opinion, each digit from zero to 10,000 had a shape with a unique color and texture.

He no longer needed a calculator for multiplying large numbers, because Tammet simply visualized the numbers in their unique forms, and then connected them together to create a new image of the solution.

In 2004, he broke the European record for reading pi from memory. Once someone suggested that Tammet learn Icelandic in 7 days. The Icelandic language is considered one of the most difficult languages in the world, but that did not stop Tammet. He learned the language in a week.

5. spoke in Chinese

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Australian Ben McMahon studied Mandarin at school, but did not get far in this. He could only understand it a little, but he could hardly speak it. After leaving school, Ben happily forgot everything he had learned about the Mandarin dialect.

Many years later, in 2015, Ben was driving when a truck crashed into him. Ben suffered a head injury and was in a coma for a week. When he woke up, he tried to talk to the nurses and doctors, but suddenly no one could understand what he was saying.

Only one nurse understood him, she was from China and told Ben that he spoke the purest Mandarin language. It turned out that Ben had completely forgotten English, but knew and understood Mandarin perfectly.

To learn to speak and understand English again, he had to go to English courses, but even when he tried to say something, a Mandarin phrase appeared in his brain, and then he translated it into English. Then he developed a strong love for Chinese culture, he began to travel often to China and even appeared on one of the popular Chinese TV shows.

6. Became a master in the study of movement in photography

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Edward Mainbridge was born in the UK but moved to the United States at the age of 20. There he began to sell books, but the business did not work out and he increasingly thought about returning to his homeland. That all changed when he suffered a head injury from a stagecoach overturning.

He began to have severe headaches, his eyes began to double, his hearing dropped sharply, and then there was a loss of taste, smell and confusion. In three days, his brown hair was completely gray.

Then his personality began to change. According to friends, he used to be a sensible and serious businessman, but after the accident he turned into an eccentric artist, and at the same time began to be careless about his appearance, growing his hair, neglecting the comb and often forgetting to clean his clothes.

Then he developed a keen interest in photography, especially in landscape and architecture. When he joined the University of Pennsylvania, he created over 100,000 photographic pictures of animals and humans in various movement positions. He was able to capture such small details that the ordinary human eye could not distinguish.

7. Got a talent for music

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In 2006, Derek Amato dived into a pool without knowing how deep it was. The pool was very shallow and Amato hit his head hard. He lost 35% of his hearing, his eyes were bloodshot, and his whole body ached so badly as if he had been beaten.

His vision also suffered, he began to see everything vaguely, and with peripheral vision he saw moving drop-shaped objects. After a few days he felt better, but he began to feel an incomprehensible excitement, his fingers began to twitch, he could not concentrate on something.

One day Derek visited his friend Ricky and saw a piano in his house. He sat down for him and began to play and play, he played like that for several hours without a break (!). Previously, he only knew how to play the guitar and never touched the piano keys.

In his thinking, he saw black and white spots that flowed from left to right in a patterned path. His fingers only reproduced these movements using the piano keys. Derek still hasn't learned how to use sheet music, but he still plays great music from his own mind.

8. Began to perform complex calendar calculations

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On January 15, 1979, 10-year-old Orlando Serells was playing baseball with other children and was hit hard in the head. He almost did not notice this injury and continued to play further, and when he came home, he did not say anything to his parents.

After a few months, he had a severe headache, and when the pains passed, Orlando found that he can now easily calculate what day of the week a given date falls on, what the weather was like on a particular day in the past, and much more.

In 2002, Columbia University invited him for an examination and underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. True, this did not answer the question of why he had such a talent.

9. Became a poet and artist

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In 2000, an ordinary 51-year-old construction worker, Tommy McHugh, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, suffered damage to the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, and suffered a personality crisis after a stroke. Tommy suddenly felt the urge to write poetry and began to write down all his thoughts in his diary.

Tommy had never felt the desire to be creative before, but now his head was filled with rhymes, images and pictures. He became interested in painting and often painted up to 19 hours a day. And the images in his head were spinning endlessly.

When he did not have enough money for canvases and paints for paintings, he began to paint with cheaper paints and painted the walls of his apartment, and then the ceiling. He admitted that he simply cannot stop, and if he does not write poetry and does not draw, then he sculpts sculptures from clay.

When Tommy started selling his work, he had money. Unfortunately, in 2012, he passed away from cancer.

10. Was a surgeon - became a musician

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Tony Chikoria was an orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports medicine. In 1994, he was struck by lightning. At the time, he was only a foot from a telephone booth, which was struck by lightning.

After the impact, Tony experienced "out of body", he saw his body from the side, lying on the asphalt, and saw that it was surrounded by a bluish glow. Then he saw that a woman passerby ran up to him. As a lucky coincidence, she turned out to be a nurse and started giving Tony artificial respiration. After that, he returned to his body and woke up.

A few weeks later, Tony visited a neurologist and complained of memory problems. The doctor ordered him to do some tests, but found nothing wrong. Two days later, Tony developed a strong desire to play the piano. Tony felt like his head was constantly filled with music.

He bought a piano and started playing as if he always knew how to do it. Interestingly, before the accident, he had practically no interest in music. Now Tony began to play and compose music himself. Over the years, he improved his musical abilities.

On January 29, 2008, Tony Chikoria performed to the public as a professional pianist at the Goodrich Theater in New York.

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