My Brain Injury Unlocked My Super Power — And My Kryptonite

The little-known science behind Acquired Savant Syndrome (good lord that acronym)

Can a tragedy manifest a miracle?

Once upon a time, I was just like you. But now, what seems calm instead sets my senses on fire. A passing car becomes a piercing wail. Laughter from a group of friends triggers a terror I can’t escape. Even a moment of quiet leaves the door open for agony.

A fist wraps around my brain and squeezes. In turn, I squeeze my eyes shut. I pray for the tightening fist to let go.

Grima gives as much as it takes

The sensation is called grima. We’ve all felt that intense screech from nails on a chalkboard. Imagine feeling that way for no reason. Imagine feeling that way all the time — with one exception.

But a strange thing happens when you’re forced to live with the intolerable. An even stranger thing happens when your mind adapts to make it safe to live again.

At its worst, grima makes me want to die.

But at its best…I’d swear that I can fly.

My first flight was my last

All superheroes have their origin stories. Most happen when tragedy breaks them in two.

Mine happened when I left the gym, and my god did it happen fast.

I left the gym. I got on my bicycle. I, as usual, didn’t wear a helmet. I pressed my foot to the pedal. I made it a short distance through the parking lot when —

The front wheel came off. I went over the handlebars. The pavement only got one shot, but it only needed one.

In an instant, my brain would never be the same.

When there’s no way forward, you can’t go back

Brain plasticity is a game-changing concept. It speaks to the malleability of our brains, both in how we can bio-hack healthy brains or guide a damaged one back to wholeness.

In the book The Brain That Changes Itself, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, M.D., advances the discussion around neuroplasticity pioneered by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition.

In short, Dr. Doidge explains, our brains contain little-understood potential to be reshaped as easily as melted plastic.

A neat way to experience this yourself — if you have a little time on your hands — is to wear a specialized pair of glasses that flip what you see upside down. You’ll feel disoriented, but stick with it. Your brain will very quickly “shift,” and soon you’ll engage with the world as though it had always been flipped.

Don’t worry. Take off the glasses and your brain will flip back to normal. It’s a neat party trick.

But what if it wasn’t a party trick?

What if you had to live like that for the rest of your life?

Brain plasticity isn’t just a party trick

What the party trick shows to the non-scientist is that when one brain structure is injured, another structure may pick up the seemingly abandoned purpose. The Brain That Changes Itself details miraculous recoveries patients experienced both accidentally and deliberately being treated by this approach.

Scientists, for example, taught a woman with damaged inner ears, who for five years had had “a sense of perpetual falling,” to regain her sense of balance by placing a sensor on her tongue.

For their next trick, doctors helped a stroke victim regain the ability to walk despite having lost 97% of her cerebral cortex. You don’t need to know what a cerebral cortex even is to hear how important it must be.

Brain plasticity helped these patients regain the normal functionality they thought they’d lost forever. And if brain plasticity can return a broken brain to normal…can it enhance a healthy brain into something more?

Videos of real superpowers

Only a few of us were ever going to be born as Lance Armstrong. Michael Phelps. Lia Thomas. People who are born with extraordinary abilities far beyond those of mortal people.

Even fewer are born with abilities so rare, there’s no sense in having a competition. They’re in a category all their own.

Flying: The early version of Superman also did a version of base jumping

X-ray vision: Blind man Daniel Kish uses sonar-based clicks to tell more about his environment than your eyes ever could.

Super speed: Proving that super speed’s foundation is based as much in super stamina as super strength, Dean Karnazes can run 350 miles without stopping (not even to sleep!)

Super speed 2: A modern swordsman uses a katana to cut a pellet fired at 250 MPH.

These people, of course, were born this way.

Aside from watching a show like The Boys, is it possible for the rest of us to be transformed?

If you watch the documentary Icarus, you’ll see what it’s like (at least before the big twist) for a normal person to at least try.

What doesn’t make you stronger might kill you

If you watch Icarus, you’ll see that trying to turn yourself into a superhero not only can be a waste it time…it can hurt you.

That guy learned that even if he’d started taking PEDs and gotten the best training since birth, he’d never have been as good at riding a bicycle as Lance Armstrong at his worst.

The results are kinda funny. Once he started taking PEDs, he raced in the same marathon as last year — and actually placed worse!

If you have a choice, you’re better off exploring and accepting your true limits. It’s dangerous for your reach, like that of Icarus, to exceed your grasp. Fly too close to the sun and you’ll probably fail or flat-out die.

But what if that transformation wasn’t your choice?

What if you were changed — like most super heroes — by a tragedy beyond your control?

What if an injury took what you once considered to be an essential part of you?

What if what was left in its place had to become super if you were going to survive?

Unlocking your super powers — and your first taste of Kryptonite

In 90 or so known cases found by savant expert and researcher Dr. Darold Treffert, MD, brain trauma imbued seemingly ordinary people with extraordinary — almost superhuman — new abilities: artistic brilliance, mathematical mastery, photographic memory.

They were, in a sense, turned into savants.

But with their new skill came a new cost.

The only way to make my mind quiet

Savants often display an obsessive compulsion to perform their special skill, and they exhibit deficits in social and language behaviors. It is their unusual focus or other unique abilities that distinguish them and their creations.

After the accident, I felt a compulsive need to create. I can now write millions of words a year and edit just as many for other authors.

But after the accident, writing also became the only way to make my mind go quiet. At least for a little while. Otherwise, my mind simply will not shut the **** up.

It’s as though a dam has burst.

The creativity I used to tap into deliberately and with intense focus has now taken over. Every day, every hour, every moment — is an opportunity to be overwhelmed.

How do I control this?

If I can’t control it, can I at least keep it from controlling me?

The pain, the grima, only goes away when I sit down to create.

Those moments make me feel alive. I’ve written millions of words and edited just as many. A lot of those stories and authors did very well. A lot of them didn’t. But would I stop even if all of them had failed?

I can no longer help but create. It is my joy. It is my relief.

But eventually, I need a break. And that’s when the pain begins again.

It’s in those moments of pain and desperation that I feel most isolated. Maybe you’ve felt alone with the trauma that changed you forever.

Then I found out there are other supers out there, too. People just like me and you.

Finally, a chance to understand what was happening to me.

And with a deeper understanding, to maybe reclaim a sense of hope.

Secret origins

“Dr. Treffert believes that our brains come with a wide array of “factory installed” software — latent abilities that exist but that we sometimes don’t have access to.” —Adam Piore, “How Traumatic Brain Injuries Can Unleash Extraordinary Hidden Talents”

These are examples taken in Adam Piore’s article:

Example 1

For Jason Padgett, a Tacoma, Washington, futon salesman, a head injury resulted in uncommon mathematical abilities. When he woke up, he saw pixelated patterns everywhere… He began sketching intricate geometrical drawings, attempting to capture what he saw. [A] physicist happened to catch a glimpse of one of his sketches [and] recognized them as highly sophisticated visual representations of complex mathematical relationships…

Today, Padgett is one of the few people capable of drawing fractals.

Example 2

As a young child, Alonzo Clemons suffered severe brain trauma following a bad fall. He then developed a remarkable ability: After catching just a glimpse of an animal on television, he was able to sculpt an accurate 3-D model. His lifelike animal sculptures have earned him worldwide renown.

Example 3

In the mid-1990s, the son of a patient told his doctor that his father had developed a fixation with painting. Even stranger, as his father’s symptoms worsened, the man said, his father’s paintings improved to the point that he began winning awards in local art shoes.

At the same time, the father lost his grip on social norms. He became verbally repetitive, changed clothes in public, insulted strangers, and shoplifted.

How is it that a bump on the head can suddenly unleash this swell of creativity? And why does that transformation unleash just as powerful a weakness?

The answer would come from the mind of a child.

The science of super powers: what’s really happening?

A five-year-old kid had the awe-inspiring ability to reproduce intricate scenes from memory on an Etch a Sketch.

A doctor read a scan of the kid’s brain and compared it to the results of his dementia patients who manifested unique abilities as their other capacities diminished.

And this is what he saw in those scans…

The abilities were not new. Rather, the parts of the brain that were now lost had been keeping their latent artistic abilities in check. But for the first time, their brain could experience a free flow of ideas.

The injury empowers savants to access raw sensory information normally off-limits to the conscious mind. But there’s a reason that information was normally off limits. And now that it’s flowing through you like a roaring river…

Is a super power worth the cost?

Most patients experience negative side effects ranging from developmental disabilities to obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

Even so, these individuals speak of their new abilities with wonder.

“Amato’s feelings were unambiguous. He was certain he had been given a gift. The evidence lay not just in the ease he felt when he put his fingers on the keyboard but also in the drive he felt, the burning compulsion to play. He felt it in his heart: This was what he was meant to do.” — Adam Piore, “How Traumatic Brain Injuries Can Unleash Extraordinary Hidden Talents

If I’m honest…I’ll say the same thing.

If you’re reading this, I’m writing

When I hit the pavement, my brain changed. I had no choice but to change with it.

I have new limits. They demand respect.

And in those humble lessons, they teach me new respect for my old limits, too. The ones I thought I could defeat by holding my old habits close.

Those habits used to sustain me. They used to keep me strong.

Now those habits are gone. What used to feel like my only source of strength went with them. Am I happy with what I got in return?

Dancing across the keys

I thought that infinite potential would mean the end of me. It turned out to be the beginning.

My hands are dancing across the keys. Because I’m using this space to tell you a story, my grima is quiet. My mind is at peace. My creativity is pointed toward you.

I’m present enough to tell you what I’ve learned.

What I’ve learned is that injuries of all kinds don’t just change us. They transform us.

What I’ve learned is that the more we fight that transformation, the more we fight our own infinite potential.

What I’ve learned is to stop fighting what I already am.

What I’ve learned instead — and I hope you’ll do this with me — is to lean into the poetry of who I’ve yet to become.