Sudden genius: people who discovered new abilities in themselves due to brain injury (9 photos)

Someone became a mathematician, another - a sculptor. Although before they were ordinary slobs.





They usually say that you can't become a genius. You can be born - but you can't develop outstanding abilities. But these people prove that nothing is impossible. The paradox is that they became geniuses after severe head injuries.

Ben McMahon



He studied at an Australian college and didn't show any particular promise. Then he got into a car accident and fell into a coma. A week later, he came to his senses and suddenly began to speak Chinese fluently. He had previously studied it at school, but it was limited to drawing a few hieroglyphs; Ben couldn't speak a foreign language. But then he started, and so much so that he soon became a guide for Chinese tourists and began to host a program for migrants from this country on Australian TV.

Tommy McHugh





The man spent many years in prison, where he suffered two cerebral hemorrhages. Doctors discovered two lesions in his frontal and temporal lobes and did not promise anything good for Tom. But he soon began to write poetry and paint pictures. An ordinary criminal, who previously could not string two words together, became a famous artist. Such is the twist of fate.

Alonso Clemons



Alonso was dropped on the bathroom floor by his incompetent parents when he was just a baby. The boy never recovered from the injury: he never learned to read or write and “shone” with an IQ of 40 points. His relatives gave up on the boy and sent him to a boarding school for the feeble-minded - and that's where his abilities were revealed. The boy was constantly sculpting something: from plasticine, clay or even soap. The figures turned out amazingly precise, and Alonso's talent only developed.

Today he is one of the most famous sculptors in the United States, his works are worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Lachlan Connors



As a child, he had no ear for music and could not play any instruments. But he was into sports and played lacrosse - when guys run with sticks with nets on the end and throw the ball into the opposing team's goal. During one of the matches, Lachlan was hit on the head and received a severe injury - this led to hallucinations and epileptic seizures, so he had to quit sports. But soon Connors discovered his talent for music - soon he learned to play 13 instruments.

Orlando Serrell



Until he was 10, the boy was like everyone else - moderately lazy, not particularly inquisitive. And he hated arithmetic. And then he got hit in the head during a baseball game - so hard that he suffered from headaches and bouts of nausea for a whole year. And he didn't tell his parents about it.

When the symptoms passed, the boy began to count in his head masterfully. For example, he was told two dates (even if there were several decades between them), and he instantly said how many days had passed between them. Or he pointed out how many days in the last millennium fell on Friday.

Tony Cicoria



He was a practicing and famous surgeon, everything was going well for him. But one day the man was walking in the park near the clinic and was struck by lightning. Luckily, there was a hospital nearby and he was quickly revived. And when he recovered, he began to play the piano and compose complex pieces of music.

Jason Padgett



This guy was a total loser - he did terribly in school, dropped out of college and worked in his father's furniture store. One evening, the young man went to a bar, got into a drunken fight and received a crushing blow to the head.

He came to in the hospital, the doctors examined the young man and sent him home. And that's where the strange things began, for example, Jason saw that his entire environment consisted of bizarre geometric shapes and mathematical symbols. The guy became interested in technical literature and began to study fractals - these are figures that recursively reproduce themselves. And they form amazing patterns in two- and three-dimensional spaces.

Today, Padgett is one of the most famous mathematicians on the planet and the author of the book “Struck by Genius”



But how trauma can bring out the extraordinary in some people and turn others into idiots is something even the genius Jason Padgett can't explain.