I’ve experienced positive brain damage from having a bottle in front of me. Effects have ranged from a feeling of joyousness to enhanced powers of seduction.
A wife of one of my friends was a high maintenance bitch. She was good looking and had a great bod. But she was hard to be around.
She had a serious stroke and was touch and go . When she recovered she became very sweet and nice. She also gained about 100 pounds. But her personalty change was dramatic and positive.
What about Mama Cass? OK, not personality related, but after a head injury she was able to sing in the range that John Philips wanted her to. (Sounds so sinister when I say it that way.)
Robert Arthur’s 1963 short story “Obstinate Uncle Otis” is about a man hit by lightning who not only thinks he’s now someone else, but has the power to change reality with the power of his mind (“There’s no hill outside my east window,” he stubbornly says, and poof, it’s gone). Just a little chilling but very funny.
Surgeons may, in rare cases, sever the corpus callosom to control otherwise intractable and severe seizures. http://www.epilepsy.com/epilepsy/corpus_collostomy
This is what I came into the thread to relate; it is the first case study in Sacks’s book “Musicophilia” (which I can highly recommend, even though I lost my copy in a train station having only read the first few chapters). I believe there are other examples given in the book.
Actually, John originally kept her out of the group because he thought she was too fat. Later, they decided they needed something that sounded a bit better to the press than that so they made up the pipe incident.
Oops–taken in by an UL! Thanks, engineer_comp_geek. Poor Cass.
I don’t think it is based on a true story, but the plot of “Regarding Henry” is based around the topic in the OP. It’s a good movie (IMHO) if you haven’t seen it.
I don’t know if this meets your definition of “brain damage” or whether you were thinking of something more trauma related, but there have been reports of people with Pick’s disease developing artistic abilities. From this site:
It’s pretty easy to be taken in by this one considering that everyone, including Cass herself, actively promoted it as the truth. I think Cass even mentioned it in a Rolling Stone interview way back when.
Oh yeah–on the snopes page that I just looked up after I saw your post, they quoted her saying that.
Off topic, but my little story about the Mamas & the Papas. My Dad met Denny Doherty outside of the Midtown Tavern in Halifax, late one night, back in the early sixties. Denny was going on to my Dad and his friends about how he was leaving for L.A. to become a rich and famous singer. Needless to say they just blew him off as some drunken nut job, funny how things work out.
I recall that; it had been treated with sulfa drugs and not penicillin and apparently it can survive that and flare up later. She had an inhibited personality, and the disease started to destroy her inhibitions. She recognized what was happening and why, and deliberately let it go on for a time. She eventually went in for treatment when she thought it beginning to go too far.
That sounds similar to the reason why people drink alcohol.
Also, I want to point out that so-called savant abilities are caused by parts of the brain that don’t work properly. So if damage could affect one of those areas, it might make the brain work “better.”
An example of temporarily doing just that is done with magnetic interference.
Another example of deliberate brain damage (and by that I’m assuming we’re talking about healthy tissue in the brain), is when a part of the basal ganglia is removed for parkinson’s disease.
The part that is removed is not pathogenic: there exists a balance between excitatory and inhibitory units within this part of the brain. PD may be caused by atrophy of one of these units; and a fix of sorts is to artificially “atrophy” the complementary unit.
Though there are alternativesto doing this surgically.
The first line of that link says DBS is a surgical technique :smack:
Of course what I meant was, there are alternatives to surgical resection.
Here’s an interesting article abstract discussing musical talents apparently gained after lighting strikes, brain surgery and on some meds. Subscription required for complete article (which I didn’t read).
From Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:
Joel: Is there any risk of brain damage?
Howard: Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it’s on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you’ll miss.
More from Oliver Sacks:
The “secret” of Shostakovich, it was suggested -by a Chinese neurologist, Dr. Dajue Wang - was the presence of a metallic splinter, a mobile shell-fragment, in his brain, in the temporal horn of the left ventricle. Shostakovich was very reluctant, apparently, to have this removed:
Since the fragment had been there, he said, each time he leaned his head to one side he could hear music. His head was filled with melodies - different each time - which he then made use of when composing.