Suffers head injury, becomes musical prodigy

 Suffers head injury, becomes musical prodigy? Wait a minute! How does that happen? One day you're a normal, run of the mill individual, and the next, you're on the way to becoming a musical superstar. This also happened to a lady who woke up one day and found she could speak Russian. Only problem was her job was in sales and Russian appeared to be the only language she could now speak.

Six years ago a Denver, Colorado man hit his head hard after diving into the shallow end of a pool. Days later, he sat down at a piano and discovered he was a musical genius. Derek Amato is one of just 30 “acquired savants” worldwide. Each discovered an inexplicable abilty that was unleashed after an incident. Amato was 40 years old at the time of the accident.

“I remember the impact being really loud. It was like a bomb going off. And I knew I hit my head hard enough that I was hurt. I knew I was hurt badly,” he described in a Science Channel documentary.


He was taken to the hospital with a serious concussion, and suffered some memory loss and hearing loss. A few days after the accident, Amato visited a friend who had a keyboard and felt inexplicably drawn to the instrument, he told TODAY on Thursday. He sat down to play and beautiful, fully structured, original music flowed from his hands. He played until 2 a.m.

“As I shut my eyes, I found these black and white structures moving from left to right, which in fact would represent in my mind, a fluid and continuous stream of musical notation,” Amato said in a blog post on the Wisconsin Medical Society website. “I could not only play and compose, but I would later discover that I could recall a prior played piece of music as if it had been etched in my minds eye.”

Though he had dabbled in the guitar before, he’d never touched a piano, Amato told TODAY.
Rare cases like this open up a whole new realm of scientific exploration, as scientists investigate how this can happen. The big question is: do we all have this superhuman ability built in, if we could just tap into it and release it?

Wisconsin psychiatrist Darold Treffert, who researches savants, told the Atlantic Magazine he believes that after a trauma, other regions of the brain step in to compensate for the loss of function, which rewires the brain in ways we can’t imagine.

Scientists have a few cases to study as they explore the question, the magazine reported. Orlando Serrell was hit in the head with a basketball at age 10 and discovered he could remember the weather for each day after his accident. Alonzo Clemens suffered brain damage after a head injury at age three, but can create incredibly detailed sculptures of animals in just minutes.

Amato told TODAY that though he still gets painful migraines and has lost 35% of his hearing, it’s well worth it. Amato left his corporate job and became a professional musician. He’s released one album of original compositions and is working on another.

So I guess there's hope for all of us if we want to experience brilliance in our lives! Maybe if I hit my head unexpectedly, I may become a top 10 golfer or a Grammy winning singer! Or an English teacher! (Oh, I see that one's already happened!)

‘Dead' boy wakes up and asks for water at funeral in Brazil

I don't know whether to feel appalled or really sad at this news. It seems as if the value of life in places like Brazil is almost set to zero. I've seen that movie City of God with the Brazilian street kids killing each other over territory and heard the stories of how the local police routinely go round with automatic weapons killing whoever is on the street whatever their ages. Sad, very sad.

Apparently, the latest story to come out of that country is about a two-year old boy who sat up in his coffin to ask for water before laying back down again lifeless, according to a Brazilian news website Website ORM  which claimed that Kelvin Santos stopped breathing during treatment for pneumonia at a hospital in Belem, northern Brazil.

He was declared dead at 7.40pm on Friday and his body was handed over to his family in a plastic bag. The child's devastated family took him home where grieving relatives held a wake throughout the night, with the boy's body laid in an open coffin. But an hour before his funeral was due to take place on Saturday the boy apparently sat up in his coffin and said: "Daddy, can I have some water?".

The boy's father, Antonio Santos, said: "Everybody started to scream, we couldn't believe our eyes. Then we thought a miracle had taken place and our boy had come back to life. "Then Kelvin just laid back down, the way he was. We couldn't wake him. He was dead again." Mr Santos rushed his son back to the Aberlardo Santos hospital in Belem,where the doctors reexamined the boy and confirmed that he had no signs of life.

He said: "They assured me that he really was dead and gave me no explanation for what we had just seen and heard." The boy's family decided to delay the funeral for an hour in the hope that he would wake up again, but ended up burying him at 5pm that day in a local cemetery. Convinced that his son was victim of medical malpractice, Mr Santos has now registered a complaint with the police who have launched an investigation

He said: "Fifteen minutes after rushing him away for resuscitation, they came and told me he was dead and handed me his body. Perhaps they didn't examine him properly. Dead people don't just wake up and talk. I'm determined to find out the truth." The local state department today confirmed the boy had been admitted to hospital in a critical condition and was declared dead after suffering cardiac-respiratory failure.

Read more:  http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/dead-boy-wakes-up-and-asks-for-water-at-own-funeral-in-brazil/story-e6frf7n6-1226386975762

Euro 2012: Polish anti-hooligan squads equipped with testicle-biting dogs, sonic cannons that induce involuntary urination

If you're thinking about going to Poland or Ukraine and starting trouble, this should give you something to think about. Don't know about you, but I don't fancy the idea that there will be dogs trained to bite you directly in the testicles. I've become quite attached to my testicles over the years and like to keep them in working condition wherever possible. I stopped wetting myself around about aged 3 and half as well so don't fancy being forced to do it in Joe public thank you very much.

Here's the story: From testicle-biting police dogs to sonic cannons capable of inducing involuntary urination, Polish anti-hooligan squads have an array of weapons ready for potential trouble-makers at Euro 2012. The English-language Krakow Post newspaper asserted in an editorial that local law enforcement agencies were more than ready to tackle any hooligan threat at England's southern Poland base camp.

                                           Alik Keplicz/AP

"The Polish police are going to come down on troublemakers like a bag full of anvils and you don't want to be there when it happens," the paper warned. 

Krakow has a long history of hooligan violence -- the local police have seen it all before and they will ruin your day if you try it on. These lads' mums and dads rioted under Soviet machine guns -- a few chairs thrown by beered-up fans is not going to intimidate them. Do not expect softly, softly police tactics.

"Poland's anti-hooligan squads are armed with: Shotguns firing baton rounds that probably won't kill you as long as you're 30m away, a truck-mounted water cannon affectionately known as ‘the typhoon', a high-tech sonic cannon that can make you wet yourself on its lowest setting, dogs trained to bite you directly in the testicles." English fans are not expected to arrive in Krakow in significant numbers, with England's Group D games all taking place in Ukraine.

Read more:  http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/euro-2012/euro-2012-polish-anti-hooligan-squads-equipped-testicle-biting-dogs-sonic-cannons-induce-involuntary-urination-article-1.1091396