
When a Blow to the Head Creates a Sudden Genius - J3L2404
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/05/eureka-when-a-blow-to-the-head-creates-a-sudden-genius/257282/
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lambda
> "Some savants are very disabled," said Treffert, "yet they know the rules of
> math, they know the rules of music, they know the rules of art. But they've
> never been taught that. Well, how can that get there? The only way it can
> get there is genetically."

Really? This is the only explanation that he can think of? Genetics? Not, say,
that people have been exposed to this stuff for years, but haven't been able
to do anything with that knowledge until something traumatic happened to their
brain that allowed them to connect it together?

I'm not musical genius. I can barely hold a tune, and while I try noodling
around with instruments every once in a while, I'm not that great. But there's
a large body of music that I know through exposure. I've just never been able
to do much with it. That's not genetic; that's learned through experience. Why
would he think that the traumatic injury would be unlocking something genetic,
rather than just allowing people to connect things they've learned through
experience in more creative ways?

~~~
Baba_Chaghaloo
That piano player in the video is hardly what I'd call a savant, more like he
hit his head and woke up as a douchebag but music is one of those things that
gets stored way back in your brain somewhere, I think. I have songs stuck in
my head all the time and I'll sleep for 12 hours and the damn thing will still
be there. Maybe after a head injury some people can recall tunes they've heard
throughout their lives more clearly which would make them easier to play.

~~~
mgkimsal
Ummm.... I can 'recall' music in incredible detail - piano, guitar, horns, the
works, and I've been playing a variety of instruments for 30 years. 'recall'
doesn't make the stuff any easier to play _at all_. To go from no musical
ability to what that guy was able to do in a day, assuming it's true, is
pretty amazing.

You can 'recall' tunes hours after sleeping - does that make it easier to play
them fluently on instruments you'd never had training on?

------
biot

      > Thanks to a piece of equipment called the Medtronic Mag Pro...
    

The title should be changed to "When a PR Piece Creates a Sudden Article".

------
bsimpson

        > Is there any risk of brain damage? 
        > Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it's on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss.

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amirmc
From the comments section: _"Precisely how Doctor Emmett Brown created the
Flux Capacitor, had he not bumped his head on the edge of the sink we would've
never had time travel via DeLorean."_

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ktizo
Reminds me of Terry Pratchett's concept of retro-phrenology...

 _You can go into a shop in Ankh-Morpork and order an artistic temperament
with a tendency to introspection. What you actually get is hit on the head
with a large hammer, but it keeps the money in circulation and gives people
something to do._

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bewareofdog
Is this why people sometimes will say they are "banging their head against the
wall" trying to come up with a solution?

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f45s8g2
I rememember reading about Treffert and his "thinking cap" over ten years ago.
I think it may have actually been in Wired.

This article was too short. I was hoping for a more "NewYorker-length" piece.

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drumdance
This reminds me of the movie _Limitless_ , in which a drug is invented that
gives people who take it access to the 80% of their brain that they don't
normally use.

~~~
batista
Only the "we only use 10%, 20% of our brain" thing is false, basically an
urban legend.

~~~
gnaritas
There are people who use 100% of their brains, they're generally flopping
around on the floor.

~~~
glogla
That's not true, for reasonable definition of "use".

There is grain of truth on the "we only use 10 % of our brains" saying, that
we don't usually use our whole brain _at once._ It is possible, but not very
comfortable, the closest you can get would be something like solving
differential equations in you head and driving a car at the same time, while
singing and thinking about you wife.

~~~
ajross
Nor is the original. The whole fallacy stems from a misunderstanding of "use".
Only 10% of brain regions are active at any given time, so they're "unused".
Of course, activating ("using?") them all at once is something medically known
as a seizure.

The same is true of circuits. If you're a pipeline stage in a multiplier
inside an ALU, you're only "used" when a multiply instruction passes by. If
only 10% of instructions in a given program are multiplies, you're 90% idle.
That doesn't mean that the multiplier is a useless circuit.

