A man from US, who had only mediocre guitar skills less than six years ago, has become a piano-playing sensation after suffering a concussion
Six years ago a Denver, Colorado man Derek Amato hit his head hard after diving into the shallow end of a pool. Days later, he sat down at a piano and discovered he was a musical genius, despite never having taken a lesson in piano playing.
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He is one of just 30 “acquired savants” worldwide. Each discovered an inexplicable ability that was unleashed after an incident.
Amato was 40 years old at the time of the accident.
“I remember the impact being really loud. It was like a bomb going off. And I knew I hit my head hard enough that I was hurt. I knew I was hurt badly,” a major newspaper quoted him as saying.
He was taken to the hospital with a serious concussion, and suffered some memory loss and hearing loss.
A few days after the accident, Amato visited a friend who had a keyboard and felt inexplicably drawn to the instrument, he told TODAY on Thursday.
He sat down to play and beautiful, fully structured, original music flowed from his hands. He played until 2 a.m.
“As I shut my eyes, I found these black and white structures moving from left to right, which in fact would represent in my mind, a fluid and continuous stream of musical notation,” he said in a blog post on the Wisconsin Medical Society website.
“I could not only play and compose, but I would later discover that I could recall a prior played piece of music as if it had been etched in my minds eye,” he said.
Though he had dabbled in the guitar before, he’d never touched a piano, in his life before.
Rare cases like this open up a whole new realm of scientific exploration, as scientists investigate how this can happen. The big question is – do we all have this superhuman ability built in, if we could just tap into it and release it?
Wisconsin psychiatrist Darold Treffert, who researches savants, told the Atlantic Magazine he believes that after a trauma, other regions of the brain step in to compensate for the loss of function, which rewires the brain in ways we can’t imagine.u00a0
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