Jason Padgett was the victim of a vicious beating outside a karaoke bar in 2002. The next day, he woke up and was a math genius. This is a short piece about Acquired Savant Syndrome, a condition in which dormant savant skills emerge after a brain injury or disease [13:41]

submitted by magnora7 from youtube.com

all 4 comments
sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun

[–]rpdayton 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I wish I could get the code to unlock some of the secret factory - installed upgrades in my brain!

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Whoa... so I wonder where all of these dormant skills are stored. Maybe they aren't stored anywhere and dude just picked them up/learned them post injury with his altered perception and whatnot.

[–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

It said at one point that there was basically a lesion and one part of the brain became disconnected, and the brain re-purposed that now-dormant part of the brain to do something useful, in this case math.

It's like how blind people will often have their visual cortex re-purposed to aid in their sense of touch or memory. The brain uses that real-estate if it's not being used. And something happened to this guy's brain that "freed up" that real-estate, at the cost of him becoming OCD, losing his confidence, and all this other stuff. Seems like this skills were lost, while the math skills were gained in their place. So likely the emotional reward feedback circuits to the cortex were cut in certain places, and the brain responded by re-wiring it in this way.

It's interesting to imagine a future of hyper-differentiated humans, with brains cut to produce certain types of genius, while simultaneously producing certain types of idiocy. Talk about a double-edged sword.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

That's really interesting, the brain being able to optimize itself and replace functionality in edge cases rather than just running all half assed due to the damage. It'd be a shame to lose that circuitry.

Hhahaa yeah designer babies due to the resurgence of lobotomy. Junk science no more!