Meet Rex: Musical Savant

[MA-Caver]

This is a series of clips from CBS' 60 minutes a story that Leslie Stahl has been following for over 4 years.
I'd love to see the entire segment. But either way the story is very inspiring and says a lot about us as human beings and our hidden abilities.
http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/91/rex

Thoughts, comments?

 

[Kacey]

According to an article from The Savant Academy, Rex has optic nerve hypoplasia:

For a century and a half, the ‘mysterious triad’ of blindness, mental disability, and musical genius has recurred with surprising regularity in the literature on savants, given the relative rarity with which these traits occur separately. The musical and memory skills of such savants are quite profound; they cannot be explained as a mere compensation for being blind. For most of the 20th century, blindness in musical savants has generally been ascribed to retinopathy of prematurity (ROP). The discovery of a new diagnosis, accounting for multiple instances of the savant phenomenon, is significant. Equally important is the discovery of a possible means to ‘unlock’ the savant phenomenon in children with Optic Nerve Hypoplasia (ONH).

As far as my opinion of such persons goes: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" Wm. Shakespeare.

The above quote seems to apply to our understanding of the brain more than any other area. Our understanding of the physical world, while incomplete, is much more in-depth than our understanding of how our mids work.