Not much hope, but who knows....

quote:

Brain Gain: A Person Can Instantly Blossom into a Savant—and No One Knows Why

Some people suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous interest or training. Is it possible innate genius lies dormant within everyone?

https://getpocket.com/explore/...source=pocket-newtab

I am still waiting and hoping.

I've read about the sudden appearance of musical savant-like ability after incidents like head injuries or lightning strikes (maybe it was in an Oliver Sacks book? I'm not remembering), but never heard of this apparently spontaneous change w/o an obvious triggering event. Wow.

The human brain is just fascinating! And so little understood. You have to wonder if there are elements in a person's background that predisposes the appearance or maybe predisposes one person to have this savant-ness manifest as visual art while another is predisposed for it to be musical versus mathematical etc.

And also, although the person (and presumably their doctor?) is unable to identify a trigger in the way that the head injury patient can clearly identify that as the trigger, another question is whether there actually is a trigger that either goes unnoticed, or there's so much time elapsed between trigger and manifestation that the trigger goes unnoticed.

Fascinating to think about!

One interesting thing here is the description of it as being like OCD and the feeling of needing to hide it from other people. It brings up the question of pathology and whether this savant-ness is experienced as more neutral-to-positive or neutral-to-negative by the people who develop it.

I would love to be a whole lot better at piano than I am, but I suspect my mediocrity is preferable to the intensity of sudden savant syndrome.

Seems to me Oliver Sacks also described patients who came to after a head injury with strong foreign (say, French) accents too.

Love his patients' anecdotal experiences!

Yes, lightning-struck Tony Cicoria was in one of Oliver Sacks’ books. He also attended Sonata Piano Camp. Here’s a Wikipedia bio.