Musical ability is a classic example of the nature versus nurture debate.
Were the likes of John Lennon and Mozart born with musical genius, or did they develop it over time?
It’s not a question easily answered and certainly one that gets confused with the fascinating story of a young man who suffered severe head trauma, only to gain extraordinary musical abilities.
Lachlan Connors, a teenager from Denver, Colorado, had dreams of becoming a professional lacrosse player when in the sixth grade he sustained a concussion during a match of his beloved sport, as CBS Denver reports.
“I fell backwards and hit the back of my head on the ground,” Connors recounts. “I remember getting up and feeling really dazed. I didn’t really understand something bad had happened.”
Shortly afterwards doctors said he was right to return to the field, but a few more hard in-game hits put Connors out of commission again as he started suffering epileptic seizures and ‘mini-hallucinations’ that led him to week-long stays in the hospital.
Upon recovery, Connors’ hopes of a sporting career were then dashed entirely when medical professionals told him that he could never play contact sport again, but in a strange twist, Connors found he had new, previously unseen musical abilities.
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The teenager found he had developed well-honed musical abilities and it wasn’t long before he could effortlessly master more than 13 instruments – including piano, guitar, mandolin, ukelele, harmonica, and even bagpipes – all by ear.
(Image: CBS. Source: CBS Denver)
Further adding to the bizarre twist of fortunes was that Lachlan’s mother, Elise Hamilton, swears that the boy had shown no musical skill prior to his lacrosse incidents.
“He really had no talent. I would say ‘Can’t you hear what’s next?’ with something like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ or ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ and he’d say ‘No’,” she explains.
No longer suffering from epileptic seizures, Connors is now a star instrumentalist in his Kent Denver high school’s musical groups, even though he plays solely by ear and can’t read music – though his mum is encouraging to rectify that particular gap.
It’s unclear just how Connors’ medical issues led to him being gifted with innate musical genius, but one Dr. Spyridon Papadopoulos tells CBS Denver he has an interesting notion, that a part of the boy’s brain was ‘switched on’ as a result of the head trauma.
“This was not a small injury for him,” Dr Papadopoulos explains. “The thought is just a theory — that this was a talent laying latent in his brain and somehow was uncovered by his brain rewiring after the injury. Clearly something happened in his brain and his brain had to recover from injury and change happened. And change may have uncovered this ability no one knew he had,” he says.
When asked about his new musical condition, the young prodigy echoed the Doctor’s sentiments; “I honestly think something got rewired,” says Connors. “Something just changed, and thank God it did.”
As remarkable as it seems, the Denver teenager’s instant musical powers isn’t the first instance of it happening.
In June last year, another Denver resident named Derek Amato, a proffesional piano player, credited his new found musical talents with sustaining a serious concussion, as Huffington Post reports.
Amato’s condition was described as a “quite rare” case of “acquired savant syndrome,” according to the diagnosis of Dr. Andrew Reeves of the Mayo Clinic at the time, referring to a person who develops extraordinary talent in a particular area who wasn’t ‘born with it’ and didn’t learn the skills earlier.
