A surgeon described how in he was struck by lightening, in fact he was on the telephone, the lightening bolt came out from the phone and it him on the face and he was flung backwards. He had a but he was resucitated.
He seemed to recover completely but then something very happened about 4 or 5 weeks later. A strange change started to occur in him. He never had much interest in music. He didn’t have a piano in the house but now suddenly he developed what he called an to hear piano music and then to play piano music. He got very excited by hearing a recording of Vladimir Ashkenazy playing Chopin’s Scherzo. He wanted to play that Chopin Squezzo.
Then he had a that he was performing in Carnegie Hall and performing his own music and when he woke up he heard music his mind and it wouldn’t stop. So quite suddenly in the course of , a month after the lightening bolt something started happening in this man’s brain and mind turning it towards music and he became obsessed by music and very excited. He got a music teacher he learned to practice he learned to try to notate his compositions. He did continue to work as a surgeon but he would, the rest of his life seemed to be devoted to music.
He also got an excited feeling, a sort of that perhaps his life had been preserved for him to bring music to the world. So the musical feeling and a sort of mystical religious slightly grandeous feeling came on him about a month after the lightening bolt and basically this has continued ever since until recently last summer he gave a concert in which he played the Chopin Scherzo very nicely, he played several of his own compositions very and he gave a talk to the audience telling them about the lightening bolt and how he had been transformed and become a different person and they were rather turned on and wondered if they could have a lightening bolt too.
And of course as a neurologist, I became quite fascinated by this and wondered what the hell has happened, what went on on his brain. There are parts of the brain especially in the which if they are excited can give rise to musical feeling and religious and and. I wondered if the lightening stroke or the had somehow stirred up with his . I hope we will be able to sort this out. He himself says as a medical man he can make nothing of it. He says he simply thinks it came from heaven he’s inspired. However since he also has himself a PHD in neuroscience, he’s prepared to admit perhaps there’s a parallel to all of this inspiration going on on the brain so we are looking for the neural basis of all this musical and mystical inspiration precipitated by a lightening bolt.