![]() (Treffert was a consultant on 1989’s Rain Man, which brought savants to a mainstream audience.) “These are ordinary people who have a head injury”-typically on the left side of the brain-“or stroke or some other central nervous system incident,” Treffert said. Thompson is an “acquired savant” whose remarkable experience can help shed light on the roots of human creativity, explains psychiatrist Darold Treffert, a Wisconsin psychiatrist and savant expert. “I’ve just deepened-I still struggle and am healing,” she said, “but I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.” ![]() “It’s been a very painful metamorphosis,” she said, and likens the experience to falling down a rabbit hole and emerging somewhere else. She looks after a baby goat, a rescued horse, a bulldog, cats, and her now seven-year-old daughter. Now, Thompson said, “Everything in my life has changed.” She’s divorced, no longer a strategist, and lives in a rural town on an acre lot. But I could sit and draw with pastels for three hours and not crash. At that time, anything-walking, driving, doing a puzzle-made me go back to bed. ![]() “Painting was unfiltered,” Thompson said. Thompson initially laughed at the thought of painting-she’d never been an artist, and what good could painting do? When she started, however, she felt elated. But one day, a neighbor brought over some old paintbrushes. It caused months of sensory overstimulation the only comfortable place she could be was in her dark bedroom. “That’s when the doctor said to me, ‘You have a mild traumatic brain injury.’” She woke sitting and delirious, “giggly, goofy, groggy,” Thompson said, “like I was a drunk.” She went to the doctor and, to test her cognition, she had to draw clock hands in the 11 o’clock position she couldn’t. She scooped her daughter, drove home, and then felt an inexplicable need to sleep-which she did, for three hours. “Immediately, the adrenaline hit,” she said. She then heard her daughter, still strapped into the shopping cart, wailing. Thompson’s first thought was that she’d lost her teeth. The impact had Thompson buckled to the ground in eye-shattering pain. Then, on March 6, 2011, Thompson went to the grocery store and, when she lifted the hatch of her SUV, without warning, the hatch collapsed on her head. “I was at the pinnacle of my career,” she said. She lived just outside Seattle’s urban sprawl, was a CEO and a nationally respected business strategist, married, and had a two-year-old daughter. ![]() Before her accident Heather Thompson was, by any measure, very successful. ![]()
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