 This gift isn't for everyone. I don't think it's it's exhausting. The thing with Derek is is that he's an anomaly He's literally one in eight billion people. If this would have happened to most people it probably would have just shut him down It's a gift, but nobody knows what the long-term consequences are Sometimes people actually kind of treat me like a superhero and what they don't realize is that there is a dark side to this gift I Had never touched a piano. I was a regular kid. I played baseball and chased girls like boys do I Drove into a swimming pool nine and a half years ago to catch a football And I hit my head in the shallow end of the pool basically when I got back from the hospital I slept for five days on the fifth day I woke up and that's when I walked up to the piano. It was dusty I knew nothing of it how to play it and I was just hoping to hit a couple notes And that's when my hands just kind of went crazy and I was playing fluid. It was instant. There was no Building up or rehearsing or practicing Remember being really shocked. I was just kind of like something profound was happening You know, I don't know where the music comes from. I can tell you that Derek couldn't do it before and it's amazing It really is it's it brings tears to people's eyes It's almost like the ghost of Beethoven jumped into my body right and took over and I just kind of went crazy He has a fluidity of movement that a lot of early players struggle with It's about a one in a hundred million Chance that somebody's gonna go have a head injury and have some kind of acquired savant skills Depending on how proficient a musician a person wants to be We know from lots of studies That you need to put in the hours the extraordinary part of his story is this fact that it seemingly happened overnight Derek's example is one of unlocking his brain's potential and unfortunately, it's associated with side effects I've always thought there's nothing in this world that can make you feel like you don't want to be on this earth Sometimes the headaches are so bad. I'm almost begging To just not even have to be alive to deal with it I worry about his headaches and they seem to be debilitating and they can last for days I've had extreme migraines since my accident loss of hearing memory loss Light and sound sensitivity It's the brain's job to filter out external stimuli sometimes what happens to in the midst of a head trauma or Something else that's causing the brain to fire excessively There's so much information that comes in that it overloads the filtering mechanism When I go out in the real world, it's like Overstimulation every noise is heightened. It's sometimes too much to where I just can't take it I've collapsed and passed out several times in the last nine years I'm in my room and I heard wham and he went down When I walked in to the bathroom Derek was sitting on the tub and he had blood coming out of his nose Since I woke up with the immediate ability to play the piano I see these non-stop Geometrical squares that go left to right in my mind's eye and it's not repetitive music going in a circle It's like one song each one of these squares maybe have a lot of notes to each square rather than just one note Derek sees white and black blocks in his brain 24-7 and another part of Derek's brain is interpreting that as music If we can find the precise neural errors in Derek's brain responsible for his talent Then hopefully we can develop a pill that can regenerate that in ordinary individuals It's almost as if someone just basically plugged a super intense Musical stream into my brain. It's it's 24 hours non-stop composition even when I'm sleeping Some people with synthesizer can smell color in Derek's case He can actually see sound The squares tell my fingers where to go and since I don't understand where a D minor is or an half sharp If it's in those blocks and squares, I'm hitting that D minor and I don't even know it and I don't capture every note that I see I don't think it's possible It's a gift, but nobody knows what the long-term consequences are Doctors have suggested that I try taking anti seizure medication and my choice is Absolutely not. Why would I want to take a synthetic product that could possibly cloud This whole process or even make it go away. I I'm not willing to take that the chance. I Think my abilities are insisting that Not only people but doctors and everybody looking in Re-evaluate what simply is possible