Random genius / Drold A. Treffert

A blow to the head can sometimes reveal hidden artistic or intellectual skills

Orlando Searle, a 10-year-old boy who lost consciousness one day due to being hit by a baseball, discovered after the accident that he was able to name the exact day of the week on which any date occurred and remember what the weather was like on each of the days since the accident. He can also recall the smallest details of events.

Jason Padgett, the victim of a violent robbery that left him with a severe concussion, began seeing "images," as he calls them, after he recovered. He began sketching them on paper, and when he showed them to others he learned that the repeating patterns with the inner imagination he drew were fractals.

These two were endowed with unusual skills resulting from "acquired savant syndrome" (savant syndrome is "focused genius" characterized by exceptional skills in a very specific field). In the more familiar form of focused genius, the kind that is not acquired, as popularized in the 1988 film "Rain Man", people are blessed from childhood with unusual talents in a narrow field: musical, artistic, mathematical, memory and mechanical skills, which stand in contrast to their marked deficiencies in language, relationships social and general mental skills. In "Rain Man", for example, Raymond Rabbit, the character played by Dustin Hoffman, had incredible mathematical skills, an extraordinary ability to calculate dates on the calendar and a tremendous memory, but also serious cognitive and behavioral limitations that resulted from autism.

In acquired focused genius syndrome, on the other hand, near-genius artistic or mental abilities appear after a stroke, blow to the head, or other brain injury. The discovery of these unusual phenomena raises the possibility of dormant abilities in the artistic and intellectual fields, "dormant genius", residing in each of us. And if indeed so, we may be able to find a way to utilize these stored abilities even in the absence of illness or injury.

The inner statue

I have devoted most of my career to the study of savant syndrome. Until the mid-80s, I assumed that this narrow genius was a congenital condition. But then I visited an exhibition of exceptional sculptures created by Alonzo Clemons. When Clemons was a child it was evident that he was a fast learner. Around the age of three, he fell and suffered a brain injury that suddenly slowed his cognitive development and left him with a severe intellectual disability, including a limited vocabulary and speech problems. However, he developed an amazing talent for sculpting in any material he could get his hands on, even butter. He also became fascinated with animals. For example, he can look at a picture of a horse in a newspaper and then sculpt an exact XNUMXD replica, where every muscle and tendon is reproduced in detail, in less than half an hour.

Clemmons sparked my interest in acquired savant syndrome and I looked for reports of it in the medical literature, but found only a few examples. In 1923, the psychologist Blanche M. Mineau described exceptional musical abilities that appeared in a three-year-old boy after an attack of meningitis. In 1980, another psychologist, T. L. Brink, reported on a nine-year-old boy who developed incredible mechanical skills after being wounded by a bullet in his left brain. He could disassemble, reassemble and modify multi-gear bicycles and invented a punching bag that could simulate the swings and jerks of a real opponent.

These few reports in the years before 1980 reflect the rarity of the condition. A concussion or stroke usually does not improve mental abilities or creativity. For this reason I decided to collect descriptions of such cases. By 2010, I had collected a list of 319 cases of "focused genius" known from all over the world, including only 32 of the acquired form.

Among the reports that made it onto my list was work done by neurobiologist Bruce Miller, now at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues. In 1996, Miller began collecting the first 12 cases of people suffering from a syndrome known as "temporal-frontal lobe dementia" (FTD). After being demented, these elderly patients displayed musical or artistic skills, sometimes astonishing, for the first time in their lives. FTD type dementia is different from Alzheimer's dementia because here the degenerative process focuses on the frontal lobes and not all brain areas.

This type of delirium often affects the left-frontal side of the temporal lobe and the orbitofrontal cortex. In a normal state, these two areas inhibit the activity of the visual system in the lobes of the brain, which participates in processing the signals coming from the eyes. The disease seems to encourage the development of artistic skills by turning off the inhibitory signals coming from the forebrain. Releasing the restraints allows the brain to process sights and sounds in new ways and unbridles the artistic and creative skills, although the damage to the frontal lobes can also give rise to the inappropriate behavior that characterizes the syndrome. "FTD is an unexpected window into the inner workings of the artistic process," says Miller.

Another study suggests that random genius results from a decrease in the activity of certain areas of the brain accompanied by a balanced strengthening of other areas. This is particularly a system of events that I call the three R's, which is manifested after a brain injury, mainly in the left half of the brain, as in the FTD cases described by Miller. The process begins with "recruitment" (recruitment): an increase in electrical activity in intact cortical tissue, usually in the right half of the brain. So the brain is rewired (rewiring) to establish the new connections created in areas that were not connected before. Then comes the release (release) of dormant abilities due to increased access to brain areas that have been connected together is no longer.

In an experiment conducted by Richard Chee and Alan Snyder, then working at the University of Sydney's Center for Consciousness, they used relatively new technology to provide evidence that indeed these changes in the brain are responsible for the acquired focused skills. The researchers used direct current brain stimulation (tDCS) to induce targeted genius-like skills in volunteers. The method produces a polarized electric current that reduced brain activity in the area in the left half, involved in sensory perception, memory, language and other mental processes, and increased activity in the right half (in the right temporal-frontal lobe).

The researchers asked the participants during and without the treatment to solve the nine-point puzzle, a challenging puzzle that requires creativity and "thinking outside the box" to solve. The participants had to connect three lines with three dots in straight lines without lifting the pen and without repeating the lines. None of the participants was able to solve the puzzle before the stimulation and like them also 29 control participants who were exposed to sham stimulation, that is, they were connected to electrodes without an electric current. However, when a current was passed, approximately 40% of the subjects (14 out of 33) solved the riddle successfully.

How is it that a person suddenly completes a task that he could not before by flicking a finger on the switch? Because these "geniuses for the moment", such as those with focused genius from birth and those with acquired genius, "know" things they never learned. Clemons the sculptor never studied art but knew how to create a framework for the sculpture (armature), which would allow his works to look like horses in motion.

A plausible explanation for the latent talent that emerges in targeted genius syndrome, whether early in life or following injury, is that these pools of talent or knowledge have been inherited in some way. We do not begin our lives as a smooth slate on which things are enacted through education and life experience. The brain arrives loaded with a system of innate tendencies that allow it to process what it sees or understand the "laws" of music, art or mathematics. A person with focused genius can tap into prior knowledge much better than an ordinary person.

The genius switch

The knowledge that these talents can emerge even late in life raises the question of whether everyone has the ability to be a focused genius and if it is possible to be such without the trauma of a brain injury or insanity.

One way to release hidden excellence is to use tDCS or a related technology known as pulsatile transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), which is also a kind of "thinking dome" that can activate and deactivate areas of the brain and expand a person's creative ability. But a technological solution may not be necessary. Meditation or even rigorous training in an artistic skill may be enough to ignite the more artistic right side of the brain and thus reveal undiscovered artistic abilities.

As researchers understand the brain better, they can find more ways to determine what happens when brain circuits are turned on or off. Methods for imaging the neural pathways in the brain, known as DTI and DTT, locate with great precision connections between nerve cells ("fiber tracking") and are more suitable than previous methods for discovering the complexity of the wiring inside a person's head. These methods allow researchers to find a correlation between brain activity and the sudden appearance of skills, and they can provide three-dimensional visualizations of fibers that bundle brain cells together.

One of the challenges in uncovering the neurobiology underlying focused genius has been to observe brains as they perform creative tasks that require movement. Not only is it difficult to sculpt and play inside an MRI machine, but also any movement interferes with the accuracy of the images. A newer method, near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), overcomes such problems because the bulky machines are replaced by a comfortable dome that measures the amount of oxygen in the blood flowing through the blood vessels in the brain and transmits the information to the software that processes the image. An even more promising helmet has recently been developed that uses a different imaging method, positron emission tomography. The helmet allows the monitoring of brain activity while the subject is sitting, standing or even exercising.

It is appropriate to persist in such studies. Acquired Focused Genius provides weighty evidence that a deep well of potential resides in the brains of all of us. The challenge now is to find the best ways to call the inner "focused genius", to that piece of the rain man, without compromising the integrity of the other mental areas.

About the author

Drold A. Treffert), a psychiatrist from Wisconsin, met his first savant in 1962, and since then began to research the syndrome. He has a page - www.savantsyndrome.com- on the website of the Wisconsin Medical Association and served as a consultant in the preparation of the film "Rain Man".

in brief

Rain Man, a film starring Dustin Hoffman, brought to public awareness the existence of savant syndrome, in which individuals with autism exhibit unusual innate intellectual or artistic abilities.

Acquired savant syndrome is an alternate form of this condition, in which a person develops the ability to draw, play, or perform mental calculations after a brain injury.

Extraordinary inner abilities can manifest in most people if the appropriate circuits in the brain are turned on or off with the help of electrical stimulation technologies or even with focused practice of a particular skill.

Case stories

The most essential eureka moments

Acquired savant syndrome has provided people with the ability to engage in singing, music and instant mental calculations. Here are some such cases:

The late Tommy McHugh, a builder from Liverpool, England, did not show any particular interest in poetry or painting. At the age of 51, after suffering a hemorrhage in the side of the skull that damaged the frontal part of his brain, he suddenly began to fill notebooks with poems and spend most of his time painting and sculpting. Doctors attributed this new talent to a "relational disinhibition" that frees the ability to create unusual pairs of words or images. McHugh has exhibited throughout the UK, and his story has been documented in several television documentaries.

Orlando Searle, already mentioned in the body of the article, started calculating dates after he was hit in the head by a baseball. He can determine the day of the week for any date since the injury as well as remember what the weather has been like every day since then. Now, at the age of 44, the man from Virginia can still calculate dates and his memory skill has developed so that he remembers the smallest details of daily activities, a condition known as hyperthymesia. Brain scans at Columbia University Medical Center confirmed that Searle is gifted with subconscious calculation and his skill is not based on remembering dates.

Derek Amato was a business coach in Colorado with no particular interest in music. In 2006, when he was 40, he dived into the shallow end of a swimming pool, suffered a concussion and lost the hearing in one ear. After his release from the hospital he was inexplicably drawn to the piano, even though he had never touched it. He began to see black-and-white dots that he could convert into notes on the piano. Today he makes a living from compositions, performances and recordings.

Tony Chicoria, an orthopedic surgeon from New York, was speaking on a payphone in 1994 when he was struck by lightning. A nurse waiting in line for the phone assumed he had gone into cardiac arrest and performed CPR. For a week or two he had mild memory problems. They disappeared over time and he continued to perform orthopedic surgeries full time without any remnants of the lightning strike. But one thing did change. He became a compulsive consumer of classical music. Before the injury, he saw himself as a "rocker", but the tirdon (obsession) also turned into a passion for playing classical music. Not long after the injury, he heard a melody in his dream that "stuck" and echoed in his head both when he was awake and in his sleep. Finally he decided to reproduce the disturbing hum and thus a piece for piano was created, the notes of which extend to a length of 26 pages, called Fantasia: The Lightning Sonata, Opus 1.

Jason Padgett, who developed a passion for math, physics and sketching geometric shapes after suffering a concussion from an assault, still owns three Futon sofa stores in Washington state. He calls his injury a "rare gift". Before the robbery, he described himself as "hating math". And now the student who did not graduate from college participates in courses dealing with higher mathematics in order to deeply understand the complex geometric shapes that he compulsively draws. On top of that, he wrote a popular book about his experiences.

More on the subject

Savant-like Skills Exposed in Normal People by Suppressing the Left Fronto-Temporal Lobe. Allen W. Snyder et al. in Journal of Integrated Neuroscience, Vol.2, No.2, pages 149-158` December 2003.

Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired, and Sudden Savant. Darold A. Treffert. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010.

Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel. Jason Padgett and Maureen Seaberg. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.

The article was published with the permission of Scientific American Israel