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September 5, 2014

Strange But True!

Q. A boy gets hit by a baseball and is knocked unconscious. A man is assaulted and suffers a concussion. What's one of the stranger repercussions that can come of such experiences?

A. Ten-year-old Orlando Serrell discovered that he could bring to mind the exact day of the week and the weather for any date after the accident, says psychiatrist Darold Treffert in Scientific American magazine. Resembling the autistic savantism depicted in the 1988 movie “Rain Man,” this so-called “acquired savant syndrome” describes cases where “near-genius levels of artistic or intellectual skills show up after dementia, from a blow to the head or other insult to the brain.”


 
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