Derek Paravicini

                

                Since I don’t personally know anyone with a brain injury or disorder, this week I turn instead to the fascinating case of Derek Paravicini.  Derek is perhaps the archetypal idiot savant: he is a prodigiously gifted musician who, while being extraordinarily adept at the piano and possessing an exceptional ear for music, otherwise suffers extreme cognitive and motor impairments.

                Derek is fascinating primarily for the duality of his condition and what it offers to the curious neuroscientist.  His most notable gift is his impeccable ear and seemingly endless ability to assimilate musical idioms.  He can reportedly recall from memory any piece he has ever heard and play it on piano.  Even more astounding, he can interpret the pieces he plays dynamically, taking audience requests and reinterpreting, say, “The Girl from Ipanema” as a Beethoven scherzo.  Furthermore, he has the fine motor control necessary to play the panorama of pieces in his repertoire and the requisite working memory to remember how to play them.

                Of course, these incredible gifts come at a severe cognitive cost.  Derek is blind and severely mentally disabled, showing an inability to remember his own age or even count properly.  More curiously, while he displays the precise motor control necessary to play piano exquisitely, he lacks the ability to perform simple tasks like buttoning the buttons on his shirt.

                It would of course be intriguing to see the inner workings of Derek’s brain to determine the neurological correlates of both his severe deficits and exceptional talents.  Would his prefrontal cortex be less developed than his primary audio cortex, say?  How would his primary motor strip be affected?  Sadly, these are as yet questions to which I can only speculate.