The "math genius" Jason Padgett mentioned in the article has drawn a bunch of pretty pictures, but has authored zero research papers. Unless you define genius by how capable you are of impressing non-experts outside the field, how does he in any way apply to the definition?
Spot on.
The article focuses a lot on 'artistic genius'. Actually it jumps a lot between a great deal of things. There's a leap between the photographer who invented new technology, to Jason Padgett who began seeing the world in a weird way, to dementia-patients who begin drawing as parts of their brains decay.
There's not much mentioned of geniuses in the meaning of people who further scientific theories like Einstein or whatever example one might give. They only hint that such people might often have autism, and try to explain that with left/right brain development.
Which if I recall correctly has been highly disputed since the 1960 Nobel Prize. If nothing else the explanation of autism and savant autism in the article are gross oversimplifications.
> >When you’re bashed on the head, the effects are similar to a dose of LSD
Clearly this article was written to appeal to the microdosing crowd. The next status symbol will be a ball-peen hammer for administering microconcussions. You heard it here first.
whats ER ?
I did LSD twice, first time was a 100 ug dose, it was pleasant experience.
10 days later i did a 250 ug dose. first 2 hours was the best hallucinations of my life :), then there was an electricity shortage for a few minutes where i live, that darkness scared the hell out of me i panicked and had a strong shortness of breath. needless to say it was a shocking experience. had random panic attacks that persisted for 2 month.
LSD is very powerful and surly is no joke.
ER - emergency room. It's, of course, a misnomer, it's not just one room. ER is common in the US, outside of the US it's also called emergency department (ED), accident & emergency department (A&E), emergency ward (EW)
> Nobel Prize-winning research from the 1960s shows that the two halves of the brain specialise in different tasks; in general, the right side is home to creativity and the left is the centre of logic and language.
The left right hypothesis is wrong. The brain specialization is much more fine grained and much more adaptible to circumstances than described.
Yes there are some specialized loci that happen to (most often) be in the left or right hemisphere, but the original hypothesis that logic is in the left hemisphere for example is utterly wrong.
An example would be language, researchers started finding language loci in the brain (by showing that if a specific area was damaged, language was damaged) and so on. Based on such evidence the left right hypothesis was formed. What was not taken into account (in my somewhat accurate example) was that there are several other areas one could injure to get language-affecting brain damage.
The thing is, such broad things as language, or logic, or art, are not located anywhere in particular in the brain, it is the interaction or many different areas and not necessarily the same areas in every person. There are however several areas that are specialized but on a much lower level than "language" search for Wernicke's area for example.
Also note that Wernicke's area is statistically in different hemisphere more probably depending on which is your predominant hand.
Isn't the key point that brain functions can rely on specific localised areas, that when those areas connections to other areas are disrupted then behaviours can be altered.
It's wrong like Newtonian mechanics, rather than like Flat Earth Theory?
There is degree to the wrongness yes. But yes I am not saying the original hypothesis was not progress at the time (unlike Freud's non contributions) the left right hypothesis did contribute at the time as it actually looked at the brain and tried to map some things.
What I'm against is referencing this idea in a context (the article) where it makes no sense, and rather lies to the reader by telling a great story based on old facts that have since been disproven.
Left right brain is wrong, not really in the same way Newtonian physics is wrong today, at least not in the form it was cited about logic being in one hemisphere. I would compare it to say, Greek anatomy. They had the idea of that things in you could be wrong. But they didn't really know what was wrong in different diseases, they came up with lots of ideas of different bodily fluids having too much or too little of one , connected to certain organs.
Now we know most of their explanations were bullshit where we can explain things a lot better. Regarding Newtonian physics my impression is that they still explain the same phenomena they explained from the beginning, but we have refined things, and realized it can not explain all things one might have thought it could explain.
If I recall correctly, that study has since then been proved incorrect - neither halves of the brain specialize clearly in creativity or logic and language
It's an over simplification of the brain, supported by the fact that those that damage their speech centers on one side still end up being able to talk again, as other parts of their brain take on the task instead.
Thanks very much to responders. Even though I watched Sapolsky's amazing Biology of Human Behavior course (a few years ago), I wouldn't have been able to correct the sentence myself.
I used to work for a charity that ran a programme helping people back into work after getting a brain injury. Each person was affected differently, but as far as I know no-one got a superpower.
In general the injury took away any behavioural filters people usually had. So the filters that might stop you from smashing up a room when angry, or taking all your clothes off when stressed, or making everyone you meet sign an NDA in case they stole your ideas (real examples) were just gone.
This led to some entertaining stories, but without exception the results of a brain injury were devastating.
Don't get a brain injury if you can possibly help it.
My favorite example of an 'ordinary' person who gained an extraordinary mental ability is Daniel Tammet. He learned Icelandic in a week. Spent 2 weeks and memorized pi to 22,000+ digits.
I really enjoyed reading about Daniel Tammet and his book (Born on a Blue Day) is fascinating, but I'd hesitate to describe him as 'ordinary'. He's likely somewhere on the autism spectrum and also has synesthesia which affects his perception of numbers (amongst other things); his relationship with the world is going to be very different than for most people.
He had one epileptic event in his childhood which may be why he was called 'ordinary.' The confound with autism of course makes the 'ordinary' designation hard to justify though (as you suggest).
I don't think it is correct to say that he memorized pi, more that he recited pi because his brain simply produced it for him he did not have to look it up.
Except that he wasn't actively calculating more digits of pi, some part of his brain had remembered the digits and was playing them back. Maybe some sub-conscious part memorized it, but it was still memorization.
So just to put my neuroscientist hat on for a moment, memorization is almost always used to mean the use of some mnemonic in order to enable later recall. I'm saying that he never looked at the 137,493rd digit of pi, and that could very well be wrong based on what actually happened, but I think of this more like the other savant in the video who just has the day of the week for a date pop into his head even for dates that have not occurred yet. In those cases 'memorization' is not the word to use.
There are many different ways to memorize information, including mnemonics, visualization, auditory recall, conceptualization, and probably a lot of others. Ancient Romans and Greeks used the method of loci[1] to memorize massive amounts of information that used spacial memory to store information in a virtual palace or room in your mind, which doesn't use mnemonics. From the wiki:
"In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject 'walks' through these loci in their imagination and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by 'walking' through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items."
Different aphasias like anomic aphasia(the inability or difficulty to retrieving particular verbs or nouns)[1] indicate that the systems used to store and retrieve different forms of memory differ depending on the type of information, or at very least that the concept of a thing is stored differently than its word.
All calendar calculation is done with techniques and/or memorization. All pi memorization is done with mnemonic techniques. I've been in that scene for 7+ years and have never seen a credible exception.
Might be unrelated but after the doctors extracted a brain tumor from my brain when I was 14 I experienced a sudden burst in creativity that is still here. It was like an explosion.
Would you say that your creativity was repressed beforehand, and removing the tumor brought it to normal levels? Or was it normal beforehand, and now it's even better? If the latter, care to share more details or examples?
I think it was normal before and after that it improved considerably. I was unable of stop writing for 3 weeks straight after the intervention (nothing remarkable, I was 14) ,I started drawing and painting. After some months I felt the urge to create programs in my old spectrum, something I never did because I never felt the urge. I had to learn how to focus my attention in something because I left a lot of work unfinished too.
Normal isn't defined by yourself alone. Rather, it's the average of other people. If you are significantly more creative than the average person, it should be fairly simple to demonstrate that that's the case.
Except, none of the abilities mentioned are really extreme. More like, you have a personality change, and now spend the time to become as good as other experts.
A great book that touches on the subject is "Musicophilia" by the late Oliver Sacks. It goes deep into the neurology of conditions like acquired savant syndrome, though the core of the book is on music-related neurological anomlaies
https://www.amazon.com/Musicophilia-Tales-Music-Revised-Expa...
My dad knew someone who had a reinforcing steel bar stuck into the middle of his head; The bar entered is mouth and exited in the middle of the top of his skill. After that, the guy was noticeably smarter but also more irascible. My dad theory was that the healing of the brain raised the number of synapses and ridges[1] in the damaged part of the brain (which in this case was right between the two cerebral hemispheres). Albert Einstein's brain had four ridges instead of three.
The kind of genius associated with autistic syndrome appears to me that it could be a result of reduced functionality in certain brain regions related to social functions and boredom control. Most people do not enjoy focusing on a single activity for most of their waking hours. Someone who consistently practices a craft for 8 hours a day would accumulate >10,000 hours in just 4 years, sufficient to become an expert in most non-professional activites. Within 15 years, such focus would yield >40,000 hours which is more than the actual practice time most professionals have under their belt. (Most normal professionals do not really get to practice their craft 8 hours a day and they probably take more vacations than these ‘geniuses’ do.)
A further boost might come from less distraction and inhibition since their brains might not be influenced as much by the presence and potential judgements of other people. Genius-level work tends to be out of norm and most adults are conditioned to avoid standing out too much. If a potential Einstein were highly sensitive to established scientific worldview at the time, they probably would be discouraged from persisting for 10 years to solve the mystery in their imagination, or at least miss the path that veers off too much from the standard theory.
From the article: “Muybridge was no exception. After the bet, he moved to Philadelphia and continued with his passion for capturing motion on film, photographing all kinds of activities such as walking up and down the stairs and, oddly, himself swinging a pickaxe in the nude. Between 1883 and 1886, he took more than 100,000 pictures.”
> Someone who consistently practices a craft for 8 hours a day will accumulate >10,000 hours in just 4 years, sufficient to become an expert in most non-professional activites.
That assumes that all those hours result in skill impfovemeonts. They do not. Commuters don't become expert drivers just because they get stuck in traffic for hours a day.
You say that, but my clutch control jumped leaps and bounds (back when I drove a manual for commuting), to the point that I could keep distance with the car in front while half a sleep and without needing to tap the break peddle.
Some of the other skills I learned were less admirable. Eg learning to use a touch screen phone while keeping an eye on the car in front (I'd only do this if traffic was stationary though). And learning how to accelerate quickly because I needed to steal a small gap at a busy junction.
Yes. A good demo of this is starting off in 3rd gear (for demo purposes!). Without training fine clutch control, you'll just stall. After hours of traffic, it's easy.
Indeed, I would imagine that thousands of hours of commuting would make one an expert at those specific skills. That said, I imagine the skill ceiling is quite low and likely reached long before 10,000 hours, and the skill set is certainly different from what most people mean by “expert driver.”
> That said, I imagine the skill ceiling is quite low and likely reached long before 10,000 hours, and the skill set is certainly different from what most people mean by “expert driver.”
It doesnt take much practice to become a marginally-skilled driver. But that doesn't mean there's little difference between marginal drivers and people who spend their entire day behind the steering wheel...
I once guesstimated that I spent maybe 7,500 hours (over 3.5 years) driving around in taxis. Towards the end of that period I started to notice things that the other cars on the road would likely do, and point this out to my passengers. "See that car? it's going to change lanes and that other guy is going to have to slam on his brakes..."
After I 'retired', I was driving with my mother. Our light turned green, but I saw that the car in the cross traffic couldn't see that his light had turned red (on account of the sunset). I waited, and watched as he slammed on his brakes.
There's something to putting in time on any activity. I think the relevant saying is not "practice makes perfect", but "perfect practice makes perfect". If you spend 10,000 hours practicing something wrong it won't be as helpful as 1,000 hours practicing it right.
Bruce Lee said, "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
I really wonder how all this unspoken communication is going to change with self-driving cars.
On the German Autobahn, the amount of observing and consideration is very high, and if people are new it can be very stressful. You basically have to keep in mind everyone around you, their respective speeds, potential moves and how a move from you will change their options and responses.
One common situation is when you come up behind a slow car on your lane, but the lane to the left (where you need to go to keep your current speed and overtake) has somebody coming up fast from the back. If you move there, you might force that person to brake. Now, they obviously see your situation and might slow down a little or speed up, so you can adjust your speed (speed up and pull into the left lane or lay off the gas and delay switching just long enough to let them pass). If there is another left lane they might move over to that too if possible. In this case, the communication is mostly in those small changes in speed that tell you their intention.
Now how should I read an automatic car? It's going to be very chaotic before we figure it out.
Hopefully it won't be as bad as you are thinking if all the car AI's make the same choices in every situation. That way you can get a much better feel for how those cars operate.
In reality I think your concern, shared by others will result in cars that act a lot more like buses. Almost always in the slow lane. Going a very safe speed. Leaving the faster/passing lanes to more dangerous humans.
The autonomous cars may soon be required to have visible markings so that they are easy to tell apart as well. Perhaps the color yellow could be reserved for them?
These changes will still be an adjustment, but hopefully one that doesn't result in a major number of accidents.
I worry that driving is the last continuous attention/frequently applied skill thing humans do, and that they will quickly deskill when they assume that a machine will automatically take them where they want to go.
One option is that the cars explicitly communicate, and make a joint plan that minimizes acceleration, danger and unexpectedness.
Of course a legacy non-robot car is a special case the robots have to think about carefully. The robots will give you similar signals to those given by human drivers now. These have been active areas of research for a while now.
People can't operate perfectly. "Good practice makes better" is my version, not half as pithy.
"Practice makes perfect" is a bit weird as a motivational phrase, as no one who has practised ever got perfect. In your version, who can practice perfectly?
That’s a great anecdote. I’d also suggest that there are a bunch of people who could spend exactly the same period behind the wheel as you and not develop those skills though. Some people plateau and something about their makeup stops them from developing those higher ‘intuitive’ skills
That's a false equivalence if there ever was one. When you get stuck in traffic, you aren't choosing conditions of adversity which will guide you towards higher difficulty. One could easily make the comparison between traffic jams and monotony. When one practices a skill, they get to choose the level of difficulty as well as a number of other factors related to the activity. A traffic jam is hardly comparable and it's not surprising that monotony does not really improve anyones' driving skills. However, compare your driving skills to someone from India where there are no traffic lights, and you'll probably go running out of the car. They are able to take higher risks because they deal with it every day.
Traffic jams, 9-to-5 job.. I'm not sure what those have to do with the topic at all. Yes, the 10,000 hours thing doesn't include every possible human (in)activity, no-one thinks it does.
Actually we do have traffic lights. They are just optional.
Jokes aside, the conditions are different. Most traffic in India is extremely slow moving, which makes those risks possible. Go to a country where the to Urban driving speed is over 50 kph (~30 mph), say 80-100 kph, Indian drivers will refuse to take those risks.
>Most traffic in India is extremely slow moving, which makes those risks possible. Go to a country where the to Urban driving speed is over 50 kph (~30 mph), say 80-100 kph, Indian drivers will refuse to take those risks.
I think the 10,000h thing should have a caveat that you also must do the 10,000 with the purpose of improving that skill, and not just doing something for 10,000 hours absent-minded.
So if you wanted to improve your driving then you'd do 10,000h of driving in which you'd try to become better than the last hour in every one of those hours.
Similarly, runners don't just do "running for fun" when they try to improve their skill, or count walking as part of their 10,000 hours. They try to beat their previous scores when they train.
This is exactly what Cal Newport talks about in So Good They Can't Ignore You. He calls it "deliberate practice" and gives the examples of playing guitar.
He (Cal) started playing around the same time as [professional guitarist] and claims to have likely played around the same number of hours. The difference was that he stuck to songs he was comfortable with. If he ever tried to learn a song that was out of his reach, he would give up and learn a different song. Contrast with the other guy, who would constantly push himself to not only play songs just outside of his comfort zone, but push himself to play them faster.
I believe he used a phrase that really stuck with me: the idea of "being comfortable with being uncomfortable".
Not a good comparison. We're discussing active practice. It turns out that if you draw for 20 hours a week, you will get better at drawing. If you read art-history books for 10 hours a week during your commute, you'll get better at art history. If you cycle-commute to work for 5 hours a week, you'll get fit.
There's a difference between going through the motion and actually doing something that improves your skill. Commuting doesn't help with improving your "driving skill" (whatever that means) just like eating 3 meals every day doesn't make you a master champion eater that wins the hot dog eating contest.
This story (or at least one very similar) was recently in the Hidden Brain podcast[0], so I'm kinda wondering if there's a clear understanding of who's the dog and who's the tail, influence-wise.
But to your point specifically, in the podcast, I believe the guy was able to play the piano quite soon (I think days or weeks after his accident).
So to me, this points not to just an Adderall-like mental state, but an enhancement (though, sure, due to a compensation of one part of the brain for the damaged part).
To me, it feels like there are triggers or switches that perhaps optimize for certain tasks, or, it's the real default, and it's the majority of us who are off.
But it's tough to guess what, if any, are the trade offs, other than potential brain damage, I guess. But it deeply intrigues me to think about what else we'll be unlocking in ourselves in the future.
But still, I wonder how much of it is enhancement, and how much of it is a reduction in some suppressive mechanism.
Example: It's well known that beginning artists struggle with perceiving the world as symbols rather than raw visual data. When I first started to work on art, I realized I was a much better artist when tired than when fully alert. This was because I was honestly just thinking less about my drawings because I lacked the mental energy to do so. On a similar note, the trick of drawing things upside-down works for so many people because it removes the clear symbolic representation of what they're trying to draw.
So now imagine an adult, who has never trained or dabbled as an artist, receives a brain injury that severely impairs their logical symbol recognition. Due to the same injury, they lose the inhibitions that would normally prevent them from doing nothing but drawing all day, and they create art for 8 hours a day for an entire week.
I can say without a doubt in my mind that the progress that person would show in that first week would be insane. It would seem nothing short of miraculous. Yet, no true enhancement has taken place beyond the training; only a reduction in a conflicting thought process.
When it comes to things like music, I wonder about similar suppressive mechanisms. I wonder if difficulty in learning these skills has less to do with a lack of ability and more to do with conflicting cognition.
Thanks for the comment, and I am glad I'm talking to someone else here who draws, because I feel like we may be able to share common mental paradigms.
I too dabble in drawing [0] (I'm sharing mine, please, if you have any artwork, I'd love to see it).
But to your point, I think it's probably both, in that there is an enhancement due to a compensation and the enhancing of what one part of the brain is already good at.
But along with that are also reductions in inhibitions (some of which may be natural, as people tend to favor what they're good at, mixed with the novel curiosity of discovering a new talent), with probably a reduction in certain strengths that were competing with other strengths.
I know for me, some of my lack of artistic prowess comes from wanting to pursue too many fields of interest.
So I could see that the reduction of interest in some things would enhance my ability.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's like asking which side of the scissors is doing the most cutting :)
I recall hearing a Peter Theil interview a couple of years ago where he hypotheses that social awkwardness is over-represented in successful founders because such people have been conditioned to heavily discount mainstream opinions. More socially integrated would-be entrepreneurs are more likely to listen to all the nay-sayers, "that's will never work", "who would want that?", "come join this investment bank/management consultancy with the cool kids" and never start the company.
1) Was their success due to their idea being weird and nobody else was brave/crazy enough to pursue it or was it because they put in an inordinate amount of effort (and luck)?
2) How many others tried the same idea and failed?
I imagine it was a little of both as well as a few other factors, but I find it unpalatable to basically boil it down to "being crazy enough to follow their dreams" (heavy paraphrasing, obviously).
This reminds me so much of the brainrot of the focused in "a deepness in the sky".
Is there a way to induce temporary brain dysfunctionality in a region- for example by inserting minimal doses of botox. So if i had a small reservoir and a hairthin pipeline, i could experiment with partial temporary deactivation on myself- but why would i do that. I must have been mad.
This sounds like a terrible idea! Just sleep-deprive yourself, and try not to kill yourself when you get depression. At least safer than breaking the blood-brain barrier ... but also counter-productive. No free lunch?
It kind of makes sense. The total behavior is a combination of impulse and regulation. People know themselves and tend to behave (self-regulate) in a learned routine, hence regulate most of their impulses to... what probably amounts to a sort of death. [UPDATED] The insightful part about this is that this goes both ways - that your newly created genius is also unusually dangerous.
Through such an accident, you might lose some or all of your impulse control and logically end up in a completely new configuration, giving way to your (formerly suppressed) impulses and potential. It also means that you need to relearn other aspects of your impulse control too - which was sufficiently shown on Muybridge.
My pet theory is a tad different. It's not about volume too. There are subsystems that make you inspired by ideas; also subsystems that make you hold parameters and relationships of greater size, avoiding confusion and retries. Often I think of it like a larger set of registers (or a larger L1 cache). If you're too constrained, you spend more effort trying to shuffle breadcrumbs that don't connect in your mind. This would require long hours to gradually build intermediate abstraction/compression/patterns and with time finally connect the dots. I believe that quick dot-connecting is a source of pleasure.. (maybe a structural reward because it means you can integrate/validate a new set of neural network links) which makes people do it deeper and/or longer.
I do believe that social subsystems exist along more abstract ones, and it's true that depending on the person and context, social subsystem may very well grab the largest share of mind time. People with less potent or conflicted social areas may thus find pleasure in other ways, contemplating, understanding.
Often I see autists as people who grew the intellectual one faster and larger and try to use that to interact with people; which causes many issues since people and crowd are volatile, complex, stateful; unlike objects which can be reflected upon more easily. As if the social(affective) area are too crippled to yield useful emotions/ideas so they default on their stronger side, intellectual.
Yes. From my own experience, it seems to be more about increased impulsivity, while pursuing interests to a level that would be uncommon in a "well-rounded" person.
I think that impulsivity and creativity are the deeper connection, with all the good and bad that that entails. There's like a sweet spot of impulsivity where you're mostly able to function, but also generate a lot of ideas and connections between disparate topics.
So it doesn't really seem that novel that brain damage -> decreased regulation -> increased impulsivity -> creativity. Personality changes like obsession or not caring what others think give the time to work on a problem and harness that increased creativity.
EDIT> The sink is overflowing with dirty dishes, I've got carbon fiber shards all over the floor from getting so jacked listening to "Walk on Water" that I smashed my tennis racket (don't know why), it's been 7 months in this place, and I still haven't got unpacked, I'm totally not ready to pick up the kids tonight, but BY GOD IF I DON'T get my TensorFlow time in today, I'm going to be seriously pissed!
genius is in th e persistence and the a le x a n d e r technique; try and try differently, using what you know, wait, patiently, learn in a flow, then come back, come back, come back, and send yourself out in a zillion pieces to try again.
There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that similar things can happen occasionally and to some people after psychedelic drug exposure. Could the mechanism be similar?
Maybe certain drugs and traumas can kick the neural network into another state and maybe that occasionally turns out to be an interesting one.
Of course sometimes the neural network lands somewhere less favorable too. Traumatic brain injuries rarely result in savant abilities, and some people "never come back" from too much LSD or other drugs.
We all have greatness within us, but most of us have "too good" of brains. See, the brain is designed to detect risk and avoid it at all costs. It often makes things up.
You see a folded up rug in an alley-way, you think "Oh no, is that a person, am I being robbed?"
You never see a person and think, "Is that a folded up rug?"
The brain always jumps to the worst possibility. It calls Math.ceil() on risky situations.
Perhaps these traumatic injuries have changed their thresholds in terms of "what is a risky situation?"
Relative to trauma, perhaps things like creativity ( which is risky to your social status ), doesn't seem risky.
Risking social status is the mark of any success. Being willing to fail publicly(at least risking it) is required! After trauma, it's probably easier.
It’s most likely that there was a new impairment in the brain that made them change their behavior and they didn’t know that they would be better at the new task.
That isn't a good article. Sudden/acquired savant syndrome isn't a recognized condition, and it probably doesn't exist. The abilities of sudden savants are no higher than what can be achieved by "non-savants" and the abilities can often be explained by other things.
I think that it's possible that accidents can give people interests and/or repetitive behaviors that allow them to develop skills, but probably don't give them the skills directly.
I am cautious about Treffert's claims in general. I have one of his books where he appears to attribute a few cases of savantism to psychic powers and reincarnation. If you want to see how unscientific some of the claims are, read the article below, including the sidebar.
I know someone on Treffert’s registry who hit their head in an unfortunate workplace accident, and subsequently emailed him claiming to be a genius. No vetting or testing at all. He now proclaims that he is a sudden savant because he is on Treffert’s list.
I recommend being extremely skeptical of all acquired savant claims, and mostly skeptical about other savant claims in general. At least keep in mind that there isn't much real evidence for those claims.
Practice and technique can explain just about every case. Even well-known "experts" have many incorrect ideas. The popular media then amplify the incorrect ideas.
"The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness."
Good point. If it's a traumatic enough incident, the time off from whatever you're doing is surely going to make a difference in whatever your new obsession is. Thinking of disability, short-term disability, early retirement, etc. If I had an extra 8 hours a day to devote back to guitar, you sure as hell would bet I'd get significantly better at it; faster.
I'm not sure who is repeatedly downvoting my comment above. If you want to see what kind of (supernatural) evidence Treffert uses for his claims, you should read the linked article very carefully and also read his book, Extraordinary People, pages xxv - xxvi, 96, and 121 (1989 edition).
A simpler explanation: people get hit on their heads, they develop new interests (sometimes due to cognitive changes), they practice their new interests a lot, and then they become skilled at them.
