It's a poorly understood phenomenon, but according to the experts who've studied them, these people aren't just messing with us.

In real life, people don't suffer freaky events like getting struck by lightning or getting part of their brain removed and then suddenly find themselves with new superpowers, like heat vision or flight. However, people do apparently suffer freaky events and then gain the ability to do art.

6 Man Has Mystery Illness, Gains Super Memory and Painting Powers

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Quick: Picture in your mind what your neighborhood looked like when you were 4 years old. Even better, try to draw a picture of it, in fine detail. Hell, most of us couldn't do the latter with a room we saw five minutes ago. To unlock that ability, apparently all we need is a severe, life-threatening fever to jar it loose.

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"It's so strange. He just paints pictures of houses burning down with a child giggling in the foreground."

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When 30-something Italian immigrant Franco Magnani arrived in San Francisco in the 1960s, he came down with just such a fever -- to the point that he sometimes became delirious and had seizures. In the aftermath, Magnani started having insanely vivid dreams/memories about his childhood hometown of Pontito, Italy. The man hadn't visited the place in more than 30 years, but his dreams were intense and filled with detail, as if his seizures had somehow surfaced a bunch of old image files off his brain's hard drive, perfectly intact.

Magnani became so engulfed by the memories that he started to draw and eventually paint them. If the below paintings look like random pictures of streets and alleys you could see on anybody's wall, you have to see them next to a photo of the real scene to understand why they're remarkable. The photo is on the left. The painting on the right was painted from a three-decade-old memory from early childhood: