Accidental Brains

In my Trump diary last week, I talked briefly about savants and wondered if Trump was a savant of some sort. While researching the subject of the Savant syndrome, I came across several interesting stories. Savants can be of two types, natural and acquired. Acquired savants are those who are normal, ordinary people who suffer some sort of a major injury (usually to the head), and their lives change thereafter - they cease to be ordinary. How? You will find out in the following five stories.

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Dr Anthony Cicoria was a practicing orthopedic surgeon in New York. In 1994, a 42 year old then, Tony was talking inside a payphone booth. The weather was awful, a storm raged outside. Just as he was leaving, a nasty bolt of lightning struck and flattened him. His heart stopped breathing. Luckily for him, the woman behind him in the payphone queue was a trained nurse. She resuscitated him, saving his life. Tony suffered burns to his face and left foot, the entry and exit points for the lightning bolt. He later recalled seeing his own body on the ground surrounded by a bluish-white light. In a few weeks he recovered, all his reports normal.

Everything seemed normal, but he was seized with an unstoppable craving to listen to classical piano music. Having never played before, he bought music sheets, a piano and began teaching himself. Instead of playing Chopin and Bach, his head was suddenly filled with music that he would describe as “coming from the other side.” Within three months of his electrocution, he began spending all his time in composing and playing music.

In 2007, he presented his compositions to the world. A year later, he debuted with his public performance on the piano, recorded live by BBC and German television.

(You can listen to one of Dr Cicoria’s albums here and you can watch him play on piano here).

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Orlando Sarrell: On 17 August 1979, the African American Orlando from Virginia was a 10 year old boy. In academics and indeed in all walks of life he was an ordinary boy. That day, a baseball hit him on the head. The ball used in baseball is almost 150 gms, and it can be lethal at the speed at which it travels. Orlando fell to the ground, was unconscious but fortunately recovered and got up himself. His head hurt for many days. Eventually the headache disappeared. But Orlando noticed he had developed a new calendar ability. He could tell instantly the day of the week for any date from any year.

Now this is an ability some of us may have witnessed in autistic people. One man in my neighbourhood, who is socially inept, amazes us with this uncanny ability. Without being autistic, or knocked down by a baseball, I can also perform this calculation mentally. (In my Open Diary week 47 (2007), I explained how anyone can do it. But that is calculation. To see it instantly requires something special).

But that is not all. Starting from that day when the baseball hit him, he can unerringly recall what he ate every day, what the weather was like on any given day, and what he wore on each day of the past 37 years. He has been repeatedly tested by scientists, and has not failed once.

(You can watch in this 4-minute clip his incredible autobiographical memory)

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Alonzo Clemens: as a three year old suffered a bad fall. So bad, now in his late fifties, his IQ is around 40, he is unable to read or write, or tie his shoelaces. Alonzo is technically a disabled person. However, he is the world’s best animal sculptor.

He needs to look at an animal for a few seconds, and with clay in his hand, he makes an exact replica within thirty minutes. He can take a fleeting look at an animal on television, and sculpts a three dimensional masterpiece based on that image. He uses only his memory while sculpting, no photos. And he has created a horse sculpture in the horse’s real life size.

The film Rainman (Dustin Hoffman) brought to the world’s attention autism and the savant syndrome. That film benefited Alonzo. He has sold one sculpture for 45,000 US Dollars.

(You can watch Alonzo making the sculptures in the 90 second clip and see and order his sculptures here)

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Jason Padgett: graduated from school only because he had friends who did his assignments. He had no interest in academics whatsoever. In 2002, after singing with friends at a karaoke bar in Tacoma, Wisconsin, he was attacked by two thugs. He tried to fight them, but they hit him hard on the back of his head.

When Jason woke up in the hospital, the world looked different. Literally. He could see everything in geometric shapes. Frame by frame. It was like zooming in a picture so much that you see the individual pixels. He was both fascinated and frightened.

Over the next three years, he developed several phobias, never went out of the house, but suddenly fell hugely in love with math and expressing math through geometrical shapes. Instead of saying 8x8x8=512, he would draw a beautiful cube with 8x8 on each side, making the shape with 512 tiny cubes.

When he finally got over his stress, he enrolled for a math degree. He saw math equations as geometrical shapes. People found that he had a unique faculty to hand-draw those shapes. Jason uses only a pencil and a ruler. Most of his fellow students said they would have loved math as a subject if they could see it expressed in such lovely shapes.

“I see shapes and angles everywhere in real life – from the geometry of rainbow, to the fractals in water spiraling down a drain. It’s just really beautiful.” He said in an interview to Live Science.

Today, Jason is the only person in the world who can hand-draw fractals. As to what fractals are you can see here.

And you may want to watch his 13 minute TedTalk called ‘How math saved my life’.

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Daniel Tammet: is an Englishman, 37 years old now. As a child, he suffered epileptic fits. Unlike the four examples before, Daniel is autistic; he can’t drive a car, change a bulb or distinguish right from left.

He is, however, obsessed with counting. He has accurately recalled ‘pi’ to 22,514 places. He can multiply numbers and find cubic roots faster than a calculator. Since his epileptic seizures, he sees numbers as shapes, colours and textures. He considers 289 as very ugly, while 333 as very attractive. For him 117 is a handsome number, tall and lanky. ‘When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The two shapes merge, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s a mental imagery. It’s math without having to think.’

Daniel is important for science because unlike most savants, he is able to describe what is in his head. He knows ten languages. He took part in an experiment where he learnt conversational Icelandic in seven days (Icelandic is a type of language that most people would struggle to speak in after months of study). At the end of the seven days, he was interviewed on Icelandic television – in Icelandic language. This outstanding feat can be watched  in the clip titled ‘Brainman’.

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After reading the stories, the first thought that occurs perhaps to each of us is that our brain is full of superhuman abilities; we just don’t know how to tap them. It may be tempting for some to bang their heads against the wall to become a maths genius or a symphony composer. It would be a risk, we don’t know exactly which point to bang our heads at.

I wonder if yoga practitioners have tried to access those abilities through meditation or self mortification. Does enlightenment have anything do with this awakening of an ability through some blow? Did the Buddha experience some sort of a shock while meditating?

Prof. Allan Snyder from the Centre of the Mind at a Canberra university says: “Savants have usually had some kind of brain damage. Whether it’s an onset of dementia later in life, a blow to the head or, in the case of Daniel, an epileptic fit. And it’s that brain damage that creates a savant. I think that it’s possible for a perfectly normal person to have access to these abilities.”

I am sure one day science will find the ways to access these abilities, ways easier than getting electrocuted or knocked down by a baseball or thugs.

Ravi