Meet the Woman Who Can No Longer Feel Emotions

A traumatic brain injury six years ago left Leigh Erceg with new mathematical and artistic abilities — and the inability to feel emotions. (Photo: Facebook/Leigh Erceg)

Today, 47-year-old Leigh Erceg is a gifted artist and poet who enjoys spending time working on mathematical equations.

But she wasn’t always that way.

In 2009, Erceg experienced a traumatic brain injury after a serious fall into a ravine. But the effects of the injury turned Erceg into a completely different person. Before, she was a NASCAR-loving tomboy with no interest in math or art. Today, she’s gifted in those two areas, and has also gained the ability to experience synesthesia, which is when you can “see” sounds and “hear” colors while listening to music.

But she lost one big thing in the injury: the ability to feel emotions.

She’s taught herself to smile or laugh as a response to social cues, but told ABC News she doesn’t feel or understand the reaction.

Originally, doctors thought she may have developed bipolar disorder. But eventually, brain scans and scientific studies led to her diagnosis with “savant syndrome,” a rare, enhanced cognitive ability in specific areas like art and math.

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Erceg has no memory of her life or childhood, and doesn’t even recognize her own mother. She relies on her best friend since fifth grade, Amber Anastasio, to help her understand her old life.

Erceg has been diagnosed with what is known as “savant syndrome.” (Photo: Facebook/Leigh Erceg)

“Leigh was a total extrovert. She was very confident,” Anastasio told ABC News. “I just know that she is different now. It’s not a bad different. It’s just different. It’s who she is now.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 1.7 million people sustain a traumatic brain injury each year. Of those injuries, 25 percent are more severe like Erceg’s.

Unfortunately, Erceg isn’t the first person to lose the ability to experience emotion after a head injury, which is also known as a “flat effect.” “It’s not common, but it happens,” says Oscar Guillamondegui, MD, director of the Vanderbilt Multidisciplinary Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic and an associate professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

The loss of emotion is often caused by injury to the brain’s frontal lobe, which is where a lot of our emotion and expression is processed. That injury can essentially lock that area of the brain, making it difficult to experience emotions.

But Guillamondegui tells Yahoo Health that it’s difficult to know how often this actually occurs because it’s typically reported by loved ones of the person who has had the injury — which can lead to it being underreported.

It’s difficult to predict whether a person who has suffered a traumatic brain injury will experience a flat effect. “A CT scan shows that you have an injury but doesn’t predict what that means in terms of long-term outcomes,” Guillamondegui says. “We see patients that have just a little bit of blood on their brain and three months later, they can’t taste or they have some emotional change. I don’t know if you can even predict who that’s going to happen to.”

People who have had a traumatic brain injury are at twice the risk of developing a mental illness after their injury, and issues can occur even years after a person has had the initial injury, says Guillamondegui. That means a person who has suffered a head trauma could end up with a loss of emotion even 30 years after the fact.

While surgery can’t fix a loss of emotion, Guillamondegui says it’s possible to learn to live with it with the help of cognitive rehabilitation through a neuropsychologist, speech pathologist, or other specialist who can help a patient create workarounds to live with the condition. They can also help patients understand and accept their limitations, he says.

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