Wanna head full of genius?
Why not get it out of your A.S.S., then?
That’s “Acquired Savant Syndrome”. And actually, no, I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to obtain it because the requirements involve one freak accident head injury and one one-in-one-outlandish-figure chance of ending up with a crazy cash-inducing new skill like a few reported folks have in the past. For instance – remember that one dude who hit his cranium on the concrete of his pool? And then he recovered and developed this itch to play an instrument by ear that he’d known nada about before?
Yea, I thought that was as amazing as it gets at the time.
Until I heard about this Australian dude who woke from a coma – fluent in Mandarin.
As my own brain tries to wrap its head around how the eff this shiz happens, I wonder:
Is it like that lady born without her cerebellum? Like… all the other brain-employees at work compensate together to cover the missing role when one position hasn’t been filled at the office yet? Except in these acquired savant cases, they end up realizing that (in a way) they do even better in the face of sudden adversity when one quits in the middle of its life long career?
Kind of, sort of – says the doc at the 3:00 mark.
But for me, who luckily has all my faculties (really dragging that metaphor out, aren’t we?), this just raises more frustrating questions than it does offer answers. Having a fully functioning brain is never enough for me. Especially if we know that full function holds the capacity to express ourselves in music, art, and language alike. As human people, we’ve proven we can mind-over-matter our brains in so many different ways that screw us over and help us out alike. So is this superpower potential just bubbling under the surface of my brain? If so, why don’t I and everyone else tap into it? Is it that we tell ourselves we just don’t have enough time? Energy? Self-belief?
Must be.
I mean, when I was a kid, I could kinda play the piano by ear – the more I played around with it, the more intuitive I got with the keys. Had I kept up with it, I might have been like Yanni (who wasn’t born with – but developed perfect pitch through practice). My drawing and painting was also more innate and creative. And when I was learning Spanish, I was more confident about speaking it and willing to be corrected by native speakers. As I got older and more closed off, my Spanish sounded gringa, my music – sterile, and my sketches looked like suicide hesitation marks. I realized slowly that most of that potential had surreptitiously skulked off to die somewhere in a blanket of fear woven from a sudden need for applause and validation to do anything creative.
So, does it take an actual brain injury to undo an idea injury we make up in our brains?
Or could a fear-ectomy be sufficient to extract my head from outta my ass?
And drop some genius on the world?