
Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training - oblib
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/brain-gain-a-person-can-instantly-blossom-into-a-savant-and-no-one-knows-why/
======
jancsika
I think the article makes "epiphany" sound rather extraordinary. But in the
normal course of learning music there are plenty of them which we tend to
ignore for some reason.

For example: if you learned to ride a bike as a kid, you'll remember a moment
where your balance just "locked in" and there you were riding for an arbitrary
amount of time.

Now take twelve-bar blues on the piano: say you spend some weeks or months
learning some bass patterns in your left hand. Maybe you learn a simple melody
for the right hand. Then you put them together. Then you learn a few "riffs"
for the right hand.

If you keep practicing consistently, at some point you develop your
coordination in your left hand to the point that you've got a steady rhythm in
the bass line. And you won't stop playing that bass line _even if_ you mess up
in the right hand.

No longer are you merely practicing the parts that go into playing the blues,
you are practicing playing the blues _by actually playing the blues_. And each
time you play a chorus, you have aural feedback you can use to decide whether
the things you played in your right hand are worthwhile or undesirable. You
can even play a thing which you did not intend that turns out to work, and use
it later.

Essentially, you can now cycle through the blues form an arbitrary number of
times. That's an epiphany, and it feels the same as the moment you learn to
cycle an arbitrary number of times on a bicycle.

There are similar epiphanies when learning to construct a melody over a
pentatonic scale, and an even stronger one when learning how to construct a
melody over an octatonic scale. Those moments are so intense that a lot of
musicians end up just stopping there because it's so much fun.

~~~
sillysaurus3
It's remarkable how similar this is to learning programming. Anyone remember
the lightbulb moment of grokking pointers? And there you were writing C for an
arbitrary amount of time t for 0 < t < need for sleep.

React devs probably have a moment when react suddenly makes sense.

In all four cases (bicycling, music, pointers, react) what makes the
difference is dogged persistence. One day you'll wake up and things will seem
simple -- and the next challenge impossible. Rise and repeat.

~~~
hobolord
how long does it take for react to make sense?

~~~
sillysaurus3
A friend of mine is a far better webdev than I could hope to be. She knows CSS
inside and out, and seems to make it a point of pride to know every little
detail. She did it in three years of focused effort, with no prior programming
experience. It was one of the most amazing transformations I've seen, but it
was only because she worked so hard.

She mentioned the other day that she's a bit sad she can't find any aspect of
React she doesn't know. But now she's been banging her head against react
native for the past few months, so there's no shortage of challenges. She's
the primary architect of a startup's frontend webapp (and now their mobile
app). I keep trying to push her to write and post her stuff, but she still
feels like she doesn't know anything. But that feeling seems like the main
reason she knows so much now, several years later.

~~~
ehnto
To be fair, CSS is nothing like programming. So she wasn't really learning
react, she was learning the entire paradigm of programming in the context of
react. My guess is that would have been way harder than learning programming
in a traditional language and then learning React, because you wouldn't have
been able to separate the concepts that are React specific from the concepts
that are just programming. It would have been harder to answer the "why do we
do it this way" questions, which can be really important to developing an
intuitive underatanding of programming.

I would like to add as well, as a career move, total slam dunk.

------
js2
Semi-related, this recent Radiolab episode:

> Anne Adams was a brilliant biologist. But when her son Alex was in a bad car
> accident, she decided to stay home to help him recover. And then, rather
> suddenly, she decided to quit science altogether and become a full-time
> artist. After that, her husband Robert Adams tells us, she just painted and
> painted and painted. First houses and buildings, then a series of paintings
> involving strawberries, and then ... "Bolero."

> At some point, Anne became obsessed with Maurice Ravel's famous composition
> and decided to put an elaborate visual rendition of the song to canvas. She
> called it "Unraveling Bolero." But at the time, she had no idea that both
> she and Ravel would themselves unravel shortly after their experiences with
> this odd piece of music. Arbie Orenstein tells us what happened to Ravel
> after he wrote "Bolero," and neurologist Bruce Miller helps us understand
> how, for both Anne and Ravel, "Bolero" might have been the first symptom of
> a deadly disease.

[https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/131/1/39/346188](https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/131/1/39/346188)

[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/unraveling-
bolero](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/unraveling-bolero)

------
jancsika
Is there a control group of people who spend an equal amount of time and
fervor investigating a new musical or artistic path without first having the
"epiphany?"

I had a friend in college with no prior musical training who decided his
second year to become a classical guitarist. We kind of teased him at first
because he clearly had no sudden music-related epiphanies nor any idea of the
time involved to master an instrument much less learn to read music and
understand theory.

Nonetheless, he spent the time you'd think would be required on a daily basis
to gain such competency, plus starting the music track classes. At the end of
a year if I didn't already know his initial skill level and his general
obsessive dedication to all endeavors, I'd have assumed he was a savant.

Put another way-- most amateur musicians I know spend less than 30 minutes a
week doing anything resembling practice. I often hear people drilling a
mistake in that scant time. Given that, I'm amazed most people can play
anything at all.

~~~
peterlk
I think most people underestimate the amount of discipline that it takes to
get good at something, and overestimate the amount of time it takes. I learned
WAY more in one summer of programming 16 hours a day than I did in a year of
classes where I was supposedly immersing myself in learning. When I say that I
was programming 16 hours a day, I was. That was _all_ I did. But I came out
the other side with a much better understanding of programming, and a slightly
roughed up relationship for it. If I woke up tomorrow with an inexplicable
obsession for painting, I suspect I could get _much_ better than I am now in a
relatively short amount of time because right now, I've spent a grand total of
maybe 20 hours in my entire life painting. The thing that's intriguing to me
is the sudden onset of a compulsion to do one particular thing.

~~~
torstenvl
_I think most people underestimate the amount of discipline that it takes to
get good at something, and overestimate the amount of time it takes._

Truer words have never been spoken, across all kinds of domains. When I was a
fat desk nerd and decided to become a Marine, I was surprised at how quickly I
was able to transform my body and gain the required physical skills - once I
found the motivation and discipline. Ditto for language study, programming,
etc.

~~~
ntumlin
What did you do to train?

~~~
torstenvl
Intermittent ketosis with a 1500 kcal budget (net after exercise), a lot of
pull-ups, elliptical, running. Weight training focusing on arms, chest,
shoulders, some leg work.

I lost 25# over about 3-4 months while also being more muscular than I'd ever
been. Ended up submitting my application with a 290 PFT score out of 300 (20
pull-ups, 100 crunches in 2 minutes, 19:32 3-mile runtime).

------
romwell
The example with the musician (the case of K.A) in the article doesn't support
the "suddenly" part of the title.

Specifically, that person knew how to play a bunch of songs on the piano - it
just didn't click for him until a certain point in life.

If anything, that seems like something was missing from his picture that
_should have already been there_. As in - not seeing the forest behind the
tree for a while. It's not a _sudden_ development, it's the opposite.

 _Of course_ someone who can play popular music has some form of understanding
of basic music theory (chords, harmony, voicing, structure - etc). Just like
someone who has been coding for a while has some form of understanding of
things like data structures, loop invariants, computational complexity, etc.
even if they haven't formally learned them first.

"Whereas he could play simple popular songs from rote memory before", the
article says - well, at that point _he already was a musician_ , even if he
didn't know what the hell he was doing.

But that's how anybody learns - you do some activity quite a few times, then
you start seeing the patterns, then it clicks and becomes your nature. That's
why you have _exercises_ \- in music, math, science, dance, sport, languag -
anything that people _learn_.

The surprising part is not how _sudden_ the epiphany of seeing the structure
came, but rather how _awfully long_ it took and _how far_ he got without
seeing the structure.

It's like being able to write down the first 50 terms of the Fibonacci
sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, ...) from _sheer memorization
only_ , and only seeing the pattern that makes everything simple after doing
it for _years_ for _fun_.

Must've been awfully difficult.

\------------------------

TL;DR: the K.A. example doesn't seem unusual or "sudden" \- more like
connecting the dots one day.

~~~
xraystyle
I don't think that's really it at all. Most of us have to sit in classrooms
for months or read and study to understand the intricacies of music theory.
None of that is necessary to learning a few pop songs on a guitar or piano.

You can learn to play songs purely through muscle memory as long as you have a
basic sense of rhythm. That doesn't mean you understand anything about musical
composition, scales, chords, modes or anything else that underlies what you're
playing.

The epiphany described in this case seems like it's suddenly and intuitively
understanding all of that, in addition to the layout of the piano (why it
takes the form that it does) along with the ability to actually play the thing
competently.

I've been playing music for years. I understand a good chunk of theory. I
wouldn't consider myself an expert by any stretch, but I understand the layout
of the piano. I can't play the damn thing. Waking up one morning and having
that ability would certainly be surprising.

~~~
samsa
^this. I have played guitar for quite some time, starting with basic popular
stuff and then progressing to classical guitar. Despite being able to read
music and play intermediate pieces I do not have the level of
theory/understanding that the article suggests K A gained in his epiphany.

~~~
romwell
>I do not have the level of theory/understanding

Or do you? Here's the level he gained:

"I suddenly realized what the _major scale_ and _minor scale were_ , what
their _chords_ were and where to put my fingers in order to play certain parts
of the scale. I was instantly able to recognize _harmonies_ of the scales in
songs I knew as well as the ability to play melody by _interval recognition_.”

Are the italicized concepts unfamiliar to you, after that _some time_ (how
long was it?) of playing? And note that KA might have played for longer than
you have before getting there - the article doesn't specify.

------
legohead
Each of the stories listed are suspicious. They feel like the crop circle hoax
to me -- something they planned well to get attention.

Are there any provable cases?

~~~
jpmoyn
Im not sure they got their attention because only initials were provided in
the article, but i do agree with your sentiment. Also, art is such a
subjective practice. If there was a mathematics case i would be much more
compelled to believe this.

~~~
oblib
Here's one related to savant syndrome: "Daniel Tammet first came to worldwide
attention in March, 2004 on international Pi Day (3/14 of course) when he
recited, from memory, Pi to 22,514 decimal places."

[https://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/professional/savant-...](https://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/professional/savant-
syndrome/profiles-and-videos/profiles/daniel-tammet-brainman/)

~~~
schoen
However, Tammet has been a savant from childhood, so he's a case of a better-
known phenomenon. He didn't suddenly acquire previously unknown unusual
abilities in adulthood. (Learning conversational Icelandic in a week is
amazing, but he already anticipated that he could do it!)

~~~
dr_teh
Actually, he had a different name and was a memory competition champion who
practiced every day. Instead of mentioning that, he decided to blame his
entire abilities on a fever he had as a kid. Not to put him down or anything,
but a lot of it is PR.

Under the name Daniel Corney he even advertised PSYCHIC services. Definitely
his abilities are incredible, but he also spent hours and years practicing
them.

------
OldHand2018
This is fascinating. A few years ago I had a "sudden" musical accomplishment
that overlapped with some medical issues. After reading the article, I asked
Good Old Dr. Google about my medical condition and the Central Nervous System
and... There are some published papers describing some observed links between
them.

To be clear, I am in no way, shape or form a savant at anything. Comparing me
to these people mentioned would be folly. In my late teens and early twenties,
I tried quite a bit to play the guitar and was never very good and I
definitely could never sing and strum at the same time. I never touched a
guitar again for nearly 20 years until my wife signed me up for a local folk
music class. At the very first lesson, I sang and strummed as if it was
naturally easy for me, until my fingers were so sore I couldn't make chords
anymore. Certainly nobody is going to be paying money to hear me play, but
I've received quite a few compliments about how well I do.

------
lifeisstillgood
I vaguely remember a story decades ago where a group of Russians were
hypnotised to bell eve they were a famous Russian painter, and when out of the
trance they could all paint to a high professional standard.

I think what i am trying to say is that such memes have been around for years,
and appeal to our "something for nothing" part of our lizard brain.

It's why we all liked the "I know Kung-Fu" line in the matrix.

------
lawnchair_larry
Treffert has come up before, and he is bogus. He’s the only one who
acknowledges “sudden savant syndrome”, which he made up. I know someone on his
list, and I know how that person got on his list. By emailing him, and
claiming that after he hit his head, he was a savant. That’s it.

------
dr_teh
My dad's second wife could draw photorealistically with a pencil from looking
at something. She never practiced, never had training, never even showed any
enthusiasm for it.

It was one of the most soul-crushing things to witness that. She once drew
some animals in my notebook and at school the teachers grabbed it out of my
hand and wanted to move me to an art academy. When I told them who actually
drew it, and how, they were utterly speechless.

Imagine someone drawing monochrome photorealism as casually as scribbling some
stick figures. She couldn't draw anything that she didn't see, but she didn't
show any understanding of how incredible that ability is either. And she's now
an accountant...

Unfortunately this was 15 years ago or I'd add one of the drawings. But here
is something similar (even the detail on the hair):

[http://www.remrovsartwork.com/uploads/7/9/8/3/7983811/380163...](http://www.remrovsartwork.com/uploads/7/9/8/3/7983811/3801630_orig.jpg)

------
k8t
This happens because the players outside the simulation purchased an in-game
upgrade.

~~~
fapjacks
You mean they purchased enough loot boxes to unlock the in-game upgrade.

------
ChuckMcM
In a symmetric system are there documented cases of people becoming suddenly
very mentally challenged? Or artists or musicians who suddenly one day could
no longer paint or play?

~~~
defen
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yips)

~~~
sushisource
This happened to me with Archery and it took over a year to get over.
Horrible. For me I think it was caused by hurting myself with the bowstring
pretty badly on a botched shot and my mind would just freeze up anticipating
that pain... I think. Weird stuff.

------
Mikhail_Edoshin
There's a book "Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain" where the author
shows before and after self-portraits made by students who attended her five-
day (40 hours) drawing course. The difference is immense -- childish drawings
before and good realistic portraits after. And she shows the whole group, not
just a few prodigies. The whole idea of the book is that drawing is not hard
-- the hard thing is to see what is in front of your eyes as opposed to what
you mind thinks you're supposed to see. (And this, of course, applies not only
to drawing.)

------
michaelmior
Looks like someone forgot to [COMBINE PARAS]

~~~
phyzome
Nope, they didn't forget to, it's in the past tense: [COMBINED PARAS]

All is well! ^_^

~~~
michaelmior
Nope, there is also [COMBINE PARAS] in there as well. I didn't see the
COMBINED until later on in the article.

~~~
phyzome
oh jeez there's actually a whole cluster of them -.-

~~~
chris_wot
There is also "detail[derail?]"

Looks like this escaped their copyediting system. Oops.

But this article is also written by someone promoting their website. I'd like
to see some sources for where this information has come from.

------
fizx
This seems explainable.

Humans typically learn art like GANs learn. We start as children making things
and the adults, teachers, etc start grading and encouraging/discouraging us,
providing the feedback we learn from.

As we grow up, we all to some degree learn what art we like, and what good art
is. But some people learn this better than others, and some people learn more
finely tuned discrimination than others. One doesn't need to be an artist to
have good taste.

It seems like if you are a non-artistic adult who learned exceptional taste,
then you are held back by only technique and creativity. If you are creative
and/or lucky when you first decide to try to make something, even without
technique you'll make much more progress than the average person. Then, so
encouraged by the progress, you'll focus obsessively on technique and
improvement.

Once it starts, this learning process can proceed much more quickly than the
typical child learning process, because it doesn't have to wait for others to
provide the feedback.

Et voila, adult sudden savant.

------
8bitsrule
Our minds are driven, pattern-finding engines. Much of what we 'discover' is
done 'behind the scenes'. E.g. 'he woke up with the answer'.

Many musicians have related how they learned how to 'channel' ... open
themselves to write-down or perform 'incoming transmissions' as it were.

Shouldn't surprise us too much. How often do we start talking about something
- at length - without prior deliberation ... as if we just opened a valve?

It's as if, once the engine has 'figured out' the patterns, we just ... turn
it on.

------
jotm
*Some become accomplished artists or musicians through self-training.

Because only officially recognized and/or terribly expensive training is the
only way to become high-skilled in anything. /s

------
sp332
Why does this article look like it's mid-edit?

~~~
vokep
Cool article, but yea...this^

It has potential corrections and such just sitting there

------
oblib
The connection of savant syndrome to brain injuries is interesting as well.

There are some links in the article to be followed. This one has links to
additional info:

[https://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/professional/savant-...](https://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/professional/savant-
syndrome/)

------
_Microft
Funny, I've been wondering for years if something similar would be possible
intentionally. Like deliberately adding relaxation and concentration to a new
activity and at the same time becoming devoid of the conviction that one
shouldn't be able to do what one currently does. Doing it instead of trying to
do it.

~~~
romwell
Yes, I think that's called "homework" :)

~~~
_Microft
Haha :D

------
emp
Who is judging the skill of these sudden savants?

Aside from code, I draw and paint well (art school) and have built my own
furniture. I know I am far from an expert.

However to people who's last artistic endeavour was finger painting as a kid,
my skills appear expert. I don't think they could tell apart the skill of a
real practicing artist vs me, they have no foundation to judge from.

One day I want to take off 3 months, and lose myself in learning to play the
piano, 4+ hours a day. I suspect I will be pretty good at the end, but judged
as far better a player than I really am!

~~~
jancsika
From what I've read and heard, it's pretty advanced stuff. In some of the
clips I've listened to they'll hear a random excerpt of Romantic period music
(say, 20 seconds worth), and the person will immediately play it back on the
piano at tempo.

Now, if you played back the intro to Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, would the
savant give the full duration to that tied dotted sixteenth note from the
first chord? Could they play back the first page of Ligeti's tempo fugue
etude? I'm not sure, but what they do is already well beyond what even trained
professional musicians can achieve.

Digression-- our idea of what constitutes "advanced" can get a little out of
hand with myths that have been handed down over the years. Even Mozart
"cheated" every now and then. One contemporaneous composer noted that when he
requested that (child) Mozart sight read a difficult piano sonata, Mozart
improvised the development section because it was too difficult to sight read
it.

------
pnathan
Fascinating. It would be interesting to learn whether there was prior exposure
to, e.g., music theory that allowed the unfolding in the mind later on in
life.

------
chris_wot
Uh, is this a draft of the article? What is with the "Combine paragraphs" and
"detail[derail?]"?

------
RickJWagner
That's incredible! It gives us all the gift of something to hope for.

------
mceoin
A family member of mine went from speaking only English to learning 11+
foreign languages once given exposure.

No leading indicators this would have been the outcome.

