In many ways, Noppadol Bunleelakun got a raw deal at the start of his life. For one thing, it started too soon. He was born two months early and weighed less than three pounds at birth. To save his life, doctors kept him in an incubator and gave him extra oxygen. The procedure allowed him to live, but it also destroyed his optic nerves and made him irreversibly blind. Noppadol went to a school for the blind in his native Bangkok, where they taught him the things they taught all students like him: Braille, working with his hands, basic academics. One day when he was six, Noppadol heard another student playing piano, and he gravitated toward the sound that was unlike any other he’d ever heard. “The piano became my friend,” he told a reporter for the Bangkok Post. “I spent most of my free time with it.” A teacher helped him learn the instrument, holding Noppadol’s hands over the keyboard and pressing the correct notes down with him. The learning process was slow and often frustrating. However, by the time he was eleven Noppadol didn’t need anyone else’s hands to help him play the instrument. In fact, he needed nothing at all, other than to hear a piece of music a few times, to be able to replicate it. At that point, Noppadol needed to put his music education aside. His family couldn’t afford private lessons, and his new school focused exclusively on academics. For five years, he played the piano much less—he didn’t have one at home—so he could keep up in his classes with sighted students. Then a teacher discovered his talent, agreed to give him lessons for free, and Noppadol was on a path to truly making the most of his capacities. At age twenty-one, he released two jazz albums simultaneously on a major Thai label, and then two more the next year. It would be an extraordinary output for any musician; for one who had to cross so many hurdles simply to play an instrument, it was nothing short of miraculous.

These days, Noppadol is known best by two nicknames: Joe the Pianist and Mobile Karaoke. The former was obviously invented by those who preferred not to attempt to wrap their tongues around his given name. The latter is a reference to his remarkable ability to play nearly anything after hearing it only a few times. A career as a jazz pianist wasn’t what anyone had in mind for Noppadol Bunleelakun when he started his studies at Bangkok School for the Blind, but his desire to go beyond the limitations of visual impairment drove him to develop capacities no one guessed he might have.
Ken Robinson "Finding Your Element"

http://www.ted.com/talks/beatrice_coron_stories_cut_from_paper