It sounds crazy. But Muybridge is actually one of a number of people who've miraculously developed artistic, musical, or mathematical abilities as a result of a brain injury. There's Orlando Serrell, who was struck in the head with a baseball as a 10-year-old and found he could remember the weather for each day following his accident. There's Derek Amato, who woke up after hitting his head at the bottom of a pool and became a master pianist at 40, despite lacking any sort of musical training. There's Alonzo Clemens, whose verbal and cognitive abilities stopped developing at the age of three due to a head injury but who can assemble incredibly detailed sculptures of animals in a matter of minutes.

Wisconsin psychiatrist Darold Treffert keeps a registry of known savants as part of his research on the subject. Savants are extremely rare to begin with, he said in a phone interview. Acquired savants are rarer still. Of the 330 savants from around the world on Treffert's list, 300 were born that way. Only 30 acquired their abilities.



It wasn't until recently that scientists began figuring out what actually causes savant syndrome. In 2003, Bruce Miller, a professor of neurology at the University of California-San Francisco, discovered that some patients with a degenerative brain disease gained incredible artistic abilities as their condition worsened. The disease is called frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and it primarily affects the front-left portions of the brain.

FTD's limited pattern of degeneration is a crucial detail; patients who suffer from Alzheimer's, for example -- a disease that affects the entire brain -- don't generally show savant-like abilities. Why might savant syndrome be linked to a very specific kind of brain damage? One theory has it that since FTD leaves the rest of the brain alone, the unaffected regions step in to compensate for the loss of tissue, leading to what Treffert calls "the three Rs": recruitment, rewiring, and release.



"What happens is that there is injury," said Treffert. "There is then recruitment of still-intact cortical tissue. There is rewiring [of brain signals] through that intact tissue, and then there is the release of dormant potential within that brain area." In other words, savants may be unlocking parts of the brain the rest of us simply don't have access to.

Or do we?

It strains belief, but completely ordinary people are in fact capable of gaining savant-like skills for short periods of time. Thanks to a piece of equipment called the Medtronic Mag Pro, one researcher has managed to temporarily replicate the kind of brain "damage" seen among FTD patients in healthy humans:

A series of electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ''What would you like to draw?'' he said merrily. ''A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats it is.'' [...] Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions.

In fairness, a few drawings don't prove very much. But Allan Snyder -- whom, Treffert confirms, has worked with Bruce Miller, the FTD scholar, before -- is developing new, more objective ways of recording the changes the Medtronic causes in his subjects.