Is Everything the Staring Game I Look You in the Eyes I Try to Read Your Thoughts

The violent attack that turned a homo into a maths genius

Futon salesman Jason Padgett cared piddling most anything beyond partying and chasing girls, so one fateful nighttime inverse him forever.

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Jason Padgett sees maths everywhere. Even something equally ordinary as brushing his teeth is governed past mathematics – he turns the tap on and dips his toothbrush into the water 16 times.

"I don't know why I like perfect squares," he says. "Information technology'due south not but a perfect foursquare, it's 2 to the power of four or four squared but I just like perfect squares… I automatically do that stuff with everything."

Padgett is so obsessed with maths and understands such complex concepts, he's been called a genius. He certainly has a rare talent for drawing repeating geometric patterns – known equally fractals – by hand.

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But the erstwhile futon salesman from Alaska hasn't always had a way with numbers. Just under 17 years ago he was living a very unlike life in Tacoma, Washington.

"I was very shallow," he laughs. "Life rotated around girls, partying, drinking, waking up with a hangover and then going out and chasing girls and going out to bars again."

Maths wasn't on his radar whatsoever.

"I used to say 'math is stupid, how can you use that in the existent world'? And I thought that was like a smart statement. I really believed it."

Just on the night of Friday thirteen September 2002 everything changed. (Read more than about why some people become sudden geniuses).

While out with friends, Padgett was attacked and robbed past ii men outside a karaoke bar. They took his already torn leather jacket.

Padgett cared little nearly maths, instead focusing on having fun earlier the attack that changed the manner his encephalon worked (Credit: Jason Padgett)

"I heard every bit much every bit felt this deep, low-pitched thud as the first guy ran upward behind me and smashed me in the back of the head," he recalls. "And I saw this puff of white light just like someone took a motion picture. The next thing I knew I was on my knees and everything was spinning and I didn't know where I was or how I got there."

Padgett staggered to a hospital beyond the street where he was told he had concussion and a haemorrhage kidney thank you to a dial to the gut. "They gave me a shot of pain medication and sent me dwelling house," he remembers.

But once home, Padgett's behaviour changed apace and dramatically. He had sustained a traumatic encephalon injury, which can bring on obsessive compulsive disorder - OCD. In Jason's case, he became increasingly afraid of the outside world and would only leave his house to stock upwards on nutrient.

"I just remember nailing blankets and towels over all the windows in the house… I remember actually using this spray cream and gluing the front door shut."

The OCD had made Padgett irrationally afraid of germs, which had a knock-on consequence on his daughter who would come to stay with him amongst custody negotiations with his ex-partner.

"When she would come over I would obsessively wash my hands and make clean," he says. "The very showtime thing I would want to do is go her shoes off, get her into make clean clothes, wash her hands."

Simply while Padgett was experiencing all these negative consequences from his attack, something incredible was happening too. The way Jason was seeing things changed.

Following the violent assault, Padgett withdrew from the outside world and developed obsessive behaviours (Credit: Getty)

"Everything that was curved looked like it was slightly pixelated," he explains. "Water coming down the bleed didn't look like it was a smooth, flowing thing anymore, it looked like these little tangent lines."

The aforementioned thing happened with clouds, sunlight streaming betwixt trees and puddles. To Padgett, the world essentially looked like a retro video game. Seeing such a radically different view of his surroundings evoked conflicting emotions in Padgett. "I was surprised…dislocated. It was beautiful but it was too scary at the same fourth dimension."

Because of these visions, Padgett began to call back about huge questions in relation to mathematics and physics. Given his hermit-like beingness at that fourth dimension, the internet became a valuable source of information to him as he read extensively about mathematics online.

He stumbled beyond a webpage most fractals which struck a chord with him. It'due south a difficult mathematical concept which, put at its almost basic, can be likened to a snowflake. When you zoom in, you will meet information technology's made up of smaller snowflakes connected together, zoom in once more and those snowflakes are made of smaller snowflakes, and so on until infinity.

Padgett was fascinated by this concept only didn't even so have the words to describe it until one day his daughter asked him how the TV worked.

Since the attack Padgett has been able to draw repeating geometric patterns known as fractals past paw (Credit: Jason Padgett)

"When y'all're looking at a TV screen and yous see a circumvolve it'southward really not a circle," he says. "It's made with rectangles or squares and, if y'all look close, the edge of the circumvolve is really a zig zag. You tin can accept those pixels and cut them in half and cutting them in one-half and y'all get closer and closer to a perfect circle only you never actually reach one considering you tin can keep cut the pixels in half forever, then the resolution gets ameliorate just you never have a perfect circumvolve."

Padgett felt compelled to explore this intriguing concept farther. So, he began to draw. And he kept drawing.

"I had literally a k or more than drawings of circles, fractals, every shape that I could manage to draw. It was the only fashion I could manage to communicate effectively what I was seeing."

Padgett believed his drawings "held the primal to the universe" and were so important that he needed to take them everywhere with him.

While on a rare trip out one twenty-four hour period, he was approached past a man who had noticed Padgett with his drawings and told him they looked mathematical.

Jason Padgett had been a futon salesman before the trigger-happy assail that changed his life (Credit: Jason Padgett)

"I'm trying to draw the discrete construction of space time based on Planck length (a tiny unit of measurement of measurement developed past physicist Max Planck) and quantum black holes," Padgett told him. It turned out the human being was a physicist and recognised the high-level mathematics Padgett was cartoon. He urged him to accept a maths class, which led Padgett to enrol in a community college, where he began to learn the language he needed to describe his obsession.

After three and a half years of living like a virtual hermit, going to school changed everything for Padgett. He started to get psychological help for his OCD and even met the woman who would become his wife.

Simply why was he seeing things in such a foreign and unlike mode? Why was his world at present comprised of geometric shapes and graphs?

Poetically, it was tv set that again provided him with a inkling. Padgett saw a man, a and so-called savant, who had extraordinary numerical abilities and talked about what numbers looked like to him.

A physicist who recognised the drawings that Padgett was producing set him on a new path by urging him to report mathematics (Credit: Jason Padgett)

"I would always describe that math was shapes not numbers and that was the first time I'd heard everyone but me talk most what numbers looked like," says Padgett.

He scoured the internet for more than information and came across Berit Brogaard, a cognitive neuroscientist now at the University of Miami. The pair spent hours talking on the phone and from these conversations, Brogaard hypothesised that Padgett had synaesthesia – essentially a cross-wiring of the brain in which the senses get mixed upward. (Observe out more than virtually synaesthesia — and whether it can be learnt).

Information technology is estimated to issue only around 4% of the population. Some synesthetes might encounter certain colours when they hear music or odour something that'southward not in that location when feeling a detail emotion.

The condition is acquired by connections between parts of the brain that are not there in other people. You tin can be born this way or some blazon of trauma, an injury, a stroke, an allergic reaction, can modify the brain.

Brogaard believes the brain injury Padgett sustained caused him to develop a form of synaesthesia where certain things triggered visions of mathematical formulas or geometric shapes, either in his mind or projected in front of him. She also hypothesised that synaesthesia fabricated Padgett an acquired savant.

"Most of u.s. don't have that kind of insight because nosotros don't visualise mathematical formulas," says Brogaard.

Padgett adult a form of synaesthesia that gave him visions of mathematical formulas (Credit: Alamy)

To exam these ideas, Brogaard brought Padgett to the Brain Enquiry Unit of Aalto University in Helsinki, where he underwent a serial of brain scans.

While in the MRI scanner, hundreds of equations, including fake ones, flashed on a screen in front of Padgett's optics. The researchers so watched which parts of his brain lit upwards in response.

"They found that I had admission to parts of the brain that we don't have conscious access to and likewise the visual cortex was working in conjunction with the part of the encephalon that does mathematics, which evidently makes sense," says Padgett.

Brogaard'southward hypotheses turned out to exist true. Padgett was formally diagnosed with acquired savant syndrome and a form of synaesthesia. Finally, he had answers.

Since his diagnosis, Padgett has published a book almost his experience called Struck by Genius, he'southward toured the world telling people his story and educating them well-nigh maths. He is aiming to help others who have had unique or rare/interesting lives by getting their stories published or made into movies. He even sells his drawings of fractals.

The two men who attacked him that fateful September night were never convicted despite Padgett identifying them and pressing charges.

His unique way of seeing the globe has allowed Padgett to grapple with some of the most complex mathematical problems (Credit: Jason Padgett)

Years afterward, withal, 1 of the men, Brady Simmons, wrote to Padgett to apologise while he was undergoing treatment for prescription drug addiction following a suicide attempt. In a sense, two lives were inverse in the years that followed the attack.

"I'm a completely unlike person," says Simmons. "When I wait back the abysmal person that I was in the past, I but don't see how I existed on that level."

Padgett too feels like he is a dissimilar person than he was before.

"I run across information technology [beauty] everywhere," he says. He is mesmerised by unproblematic things that almost people don't even notice such every bit raindrops falling on a puddle.

Through Padgett's eyes, the puddle is transformed into complex rippling patterns, overlapping and forming shapes like stars or snowflakes. And he wants anybody else to see what he sees.

"You should be walking around in accented anaesthesia at all times that reality fifty-fifty exists," he says. "I'thousand having this mathematical awakening and all effectually us is accented magic or about as close as you can get to magic."

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190411-the-violent-attack-that-turned-a-man-into-a-maths-genius

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