Engleski A - 2022. jesen, reading 2.

A sudden genius

Derek had just left a job with a mobile communications service when he decided to visit his mother and friends back in Sioux Falls. During an indoor pool party, which his friend Rick was throwing to please a girl he was hopelessly chasing, Derek began doing backflips off the edge of the pool. Completely oblivious to the keen interest of the ladies around him, he moved down the shallow end of the pool shouting for someone to hurl a football over the water, so he could make a leaping catch. He slapped his face on the water surface, dove and hit his head on the concrete 3 feet below.

Ignoring Derek’s unwillingness to see a doctor, his mother took him to the hospital where a CT scan of his bruised and swollen head showed he’d suffered a severe concussion. No sign of internal bleeding was evident but doctors kept him there overnight for observation. He was released the next morning to his mother’s house where he slept for the better part of five days.

Feeling much better despite a persistent headache, Derek visited Rick to say goodbye before heading back to Colorado. After a short conversation, Derek noticed a small Casio keyboard across the room and his fingers started to twitch. “As we were talking, I kept looking over at the keyboard.” says Derek. “I was just drawn to it.” Since the incident, he’d been seeing what looked like black-and-white squares scrolling from left to right across his mind. He had thought it was just fogginess that would go away. As he approached the Casio, it was as if his body was intuitively reading them as notes or groups of notes. His once trembling fingers flew fluidly across the keys, releasing an unstructured and new, yet melodic, piece of classical music.

In the weeks that followed, Derek gradually lost 35% of his hearing, started getting debilitating headaches and to his utter horror became extremely sensitive to light, especially fluorescents. Still, nothing compared to the fact that his mind was continuously and unbearably flooded with squares and tunes and rhythms. His hands were tapping out beats even in his sleep and he had to let the music drain from his body like a release valve. Playing was the only thing that seemed to bring him peace.

And yet, as clamorous and cramped as his mind became, he says he never once wished for the music to stop. His mother said that the pain was the price he had to pay for his wondrous gift. For a time, he was terrified of losing it – afraid that a fall, a bump on the head or a night of heavy drinking might scare off the muse. Or that it might just disappear as inexplicably as it had arrived. His curiosity was disturbed by the persistant fear that the root of it all was something deadly that would bring his life to a halt.

He was reassured when his mother found an online article explaining the phenomenon that had altered his life so abruptly. When the left hemisphere of the brain is damaged due to a blow to the head, a stroke or dementia, undamaged tissue is recruited from the right hemisphere as a way to compensate for the loss. The right side, where creativity dwells, is then released from the logical and analytical tyranny of the left, freeing the previously untapped creative potential that had been hidden there since birth.