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Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

Traumatic brain injury is perhaps underappreciated. https://www.gwern.net/Questions#psychiatry (Maybe as death rate from other accidents drops, it rises in relative importance?) Among other amazing numbers from that page, it quotes one study that shows 45 percent of the residents of a homeless shelter had a positive screening result for TBI: https://www.gwern.net/docs/www/cmajopen.ca/03aff85438a259787...

Notoriously, Stanislaw Ulam and Steve Wozniak had major personality changes after head trauma.

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Great comment. Was curious w/ regards to Ulam. Found this on Wikipedia:

In January 1946, he suffered an acute attack of encephalitis, which put his life in danger, but which was alleviated by emergency brain surgery.

...

Another friend, Gian-Carlo Rota, asserted in a 1987 article that the attack changed Ulam's personality: afterwards, he turned from rigorous pure mathematics to more speculative conjectures concerning the application of mathematics to physics and biology; Rota also cites Ulam's former collaborator Paul Stein as noting that Ulam was sloppier in his clothing afterwards, and John Oxtoby as noting that Ulam before the encephalitis could work for hours on end doing calculations, while when Rota worked with him, was reluctant to solve even a quadratic equation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Ulam

It's posited that Howard Hughes' increasingly strange behavior and eventual withdrawal into reclusion was precipitated by a series of TBIs he suffered in test pilot crashes.

There is also a theory that he began taking pain medication for back pain related to injuries suffered in crashes, and the dosage/addiction added up over time, all the while none of this staff or medical experts tried to wean him off it. Very much like the situation with Michael Jackson and painkillers.

and Michael Hutchens of INXS who got punched in the head while riding in Stockholm.

And even more famously, Henry VIII, who fell off a horse.

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