This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Unpredictable things happen to us all the time.
Your car breaks down, the babysitter cancels, you get sick.
Those little moments shift the direction of your day or your week.
And then there are the bigger things in life, the earthquake kind of change that shakes everything around you, that breaks down your sense of who you are and what your life is.
And in the process of getting back on your feet, you might realize that something's different.
Maybe you come out of it with a new perspective, a sense of direction you never imagined.
Today on the show, we have two stories of that kind of change and the transformation it brings.
Oh, and we have some pretty beautiful music that comes with those stories.
Derek Kamado is sitting at the piano in NPR studio one.
As you're listening to him play, you might think he's had years of musical training, but Derek is unusual.
He's said to have something called acquired savant syndrome that left him with the incredible ability to play the piano.
We'll talk about what that means, but let's back up a minute.
I grew up a typical kid.
I was an extremely aggressive athlete.
So that was kind of my thing.
I was a baseball, football, basketball player.
You were a jock?
I was a jock, yeah.