Savant Skills Acquired from Injuries to the Brain

I watched a show on CNN recently called "Genius: Quest for Extreme Brain Power", hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. One of the stories was about a young man named Orlando Serrell who is an "acquired savant". He acquired some amazing memory skills after he got hit in the head with a baseball when he was 10.

www.cnn.com...

Orlando Serrell did not possess any special skills until he was struck in the head by a baseball when he was 10. He has remembered where he was and what he was doing almost every day since.

Serrell is what Treffert calls an "acquired savant," someone who exhibits savant skills after suffering a head injury or a stroke to the left hemisphere of the brain. Treffert believes the brain injury somehow frees acquired savants from the language and logic that rules our everyday lives.

It seems to me that the accident has caused memories that are stored in the subconscious mind to be available to the conscious mind. So maybe all of us retain every piece of information that we come across... we just don't remember it because there is no real reason to remember it.

When people have a near-death experience and claim to see their life flashing before them... this could be just the stored memories that are being accessed in the brain (as opposed to a pure spiritual experience).

In cases of reincarnation, people remember details from previous lives (although that information would have been stored in the brain of another body).

I'm interested in viewpoints that others have on this topic.

So maybe all of us retain every piece of information that we come across... we just don't remember it because there is no real reason to remember it.

Yeah, we do retain everything...However,if we do not leave what is called neural traces to the information then it is more difficult to remember it.




[edit on 19-9-2006 by SpeakerofTruth]

nicely put together... but yes... its amazing what you can do, when you can flick your brain hemispheres on and off...like switching between them... theres a lot more than just remembering everything that can be achieved.