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The violent attack that turned a man into a maths genius

Futon salesman Jason Padgett cared footling virtually annihilation beyond partying and chasing girls, then 1 fateful nighttime changed him forever.

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Jason Padgett sees maths everywhere. Even something equally ordinary as brushing his teeth is governed by mathematics – he turns the tap on and dips his toothbrush into the h2o xvi times.

"I don't know why I similar perfect squares," he says. "It'southward not but a perfect foursquare, it'southward 2 to the power of four or four squared just I just similar perfect squares… I automatically practice that stuff with everything."

Padgett is so obsessed with maths and understands such complex concepts, he'due south been called a genius. He certainly has a rare talent for cartoon repeating geometric patterns – known every bit fractals – past hand.

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But the erstwhile daybed salesman from Alaska hasn't e'er had a manner with numbers. But under 17 years agone he was living a very different life in Tacoma, Washington.

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

Maths wasn't on his radar whatsoever.

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

Only on the night of Fri 13 September 2002 everything inverse. (Read more about why some people become sudden geniuses).

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

Padgett cared picayune about maths, instead focusing on having fun before the attack that changed the way his brain worked (Credit: Jason Padgett)

"I heard as much as felt this deep, depression-pitched thud as the offset guy ran up behind me and smashed me in the back of the caput," he recalls. "And I saw this puff of white light just like someone took a picture. The adjacent 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 bleeding kidney thanks to a punch to the gut. "They gave me a shot of pain medication and sent me dwelling," he remembers.

But once home, Padgett'southward behaviour inverse quickly and dramatically. He had sustained a traumatic brain injury, which tin can bring on obsessive compulsive disorder - OCD. In Jason'due south case, he became increasingly afraid of the outside world and would merely leave his house to stock up on food.

"I merely remember nailing blankets and towels over all the windows in the house… I remember actually using this spray foam and gluing the front door close."

The OCD had made Padgett irrationally agape of germs, which had a knock-on effect on his girl who would come to stay with him amidst custody negotiations with his ex-partner.

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

Merely while Padgett was experiencing all these negative consequences from his set on, something incredible was happening too. The way Jason was seeing things inverse.

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

"Everything that was curved looked similar information technology was slightly pixelated," he explains. "Water coming down the bleed didn't await like it was a smooth, flowing matter anymore, it looked like these lilliputian tangent lines."

The aforementioned thing happened with clouds, sunlight streaming between trees and puddles. To Padgett, the world essentially looked like a retro video game. Seeing such a radically unlike view of his environment evoked conflicting emotions in Padgett. "I was surprised…confused. It was beautiful just it was besides scary at the aforementioned time."

Considering of these visions, Padgett began to retrieve near huge questions in relation to mathematics and physics. Given his hermit-like beingness at that time, the internet became a valuable source of information to him equally he read extensively almost mathematics online.

He stumbled across a webpage virtually fractals which struck a chord with him. It'south a hard mathematical concept which, put at its most bones, can be likened to a snowflake. When you zoom in, y'all volition see information technology's made upwards of smaller snowflakes connected together, zoom in once again and those snowflakes are made of smaller snowflakes, and so on until infinity.

Padgett was fascinated by this concept but didn't yet have the words to describe it until ane day his daughter asked him how the Tv set worked.

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

"When you lot're looking at a TV screen and y'all see a circle it's really not a circumvolve," he says. "It'due south made with rectangles or squares and, if yous wait close, the edge of the circle is really a zig zag. Yous can take those pixels and cut them in half and cutting them in half and y'all become closer and closer to a perfect circle but y'all never really reach one considering you can keep cutting the pixels in one-half forever, then the resolution gets better but yous never have a perfect circumvolve."

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

"I had literally a thousand or more drawings of circles, fractals, every shape that I could manage to draw. It was the simply way I could manage to communicate effectively what I was seeing."

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

While on a rare trip out i day, he was approached by a human who had noticed Padgett with his drawings and told him they looked mathematical.

Jason Padgett had been a futon salesman earlier the violent set on that inverse his life (Credit: Jason Padgett)

"I'one thousand trying to describe the discrete construction of space time based on Planck length (a tiny unit of measurement developed by physicist Max Planck) and quantum blackness holes," Padgett told him. It turned out the man was a physicist and recognised the high-level mathematics Padgett was drawing. He urged him to take a maths class, which led Padgett to enrol in a customs college, where he began to acquire the language he needed to describe his obsession.

After iii and a half years of living similar 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 get his wife.

But why was he seeing things in such a strange and different mode? Why was his world now comprised of geometric shapes and graphs?

Poetically, information technology was television that again provided him with a clue. Padgett saw a man, a so-chosen savant, who had extraordinary numerical abilities and talked most what numbers looked like to him.

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

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

He scoured the cyberspace 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 – substantially a cross-wiring of the brain in which the senses get mixed up. (Find out more than about synaesthesia — and whether it can be learnt).

It is estimated to effect only around 4% of the population. Some synesthetes might see certain colours when they hear music or smell something that's not there when feeling a item emotion.

The status is caused by connections betwixt parts of the brain that are not there in other people. You can be born this way or some type of trauma, an injury, a stroke, an allergic reaction, tin can change the encephalon.

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

"Most of us don't accept that kind of insight because we don't visualise mathematical formulas," says Brogaard.

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

To exam these ideas, Brogaard brought Padgett to the Brain Inquiry 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'southward eyes. The researchers then watched which parts of his brain lit up in response.

"They found that I had access to parts of the brain that nosotros don't accept witting access to and too the visual cortex was working in conjunction with the function of the brain that does mathematics, which obviously makes sense," says Padgett.

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

Since his diagnosis, Padgett has published a book virtually his experience called Struck past Genius, he's toured the globe telling people his story and educating them nearly 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 fifty-fifty sells his drawings of fractals.

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

His unique way of seeing the world has allowed Padgett to grapple with some of the well-nigh circuitous mathematical problems (Credit: Jason Padgett)

Years later, however, i of the men, Brady Simmons, wrote to Padgett to apologise while he was undergoing handling for prescription drug addiction post-obit a suicide try. In a sense, two lives were changed in the years that followed the attack.

"I'thousand a completely different person," says Simmons. "When I look back the bottomless person that I was in the past, I only don't see how I existed on that level."

Padgett too feels like he is a different person than he was earlier.

"I see it [dazzler] everywhere," he says. He is mesmerised by elementary things that nearly people don't even notice such every bit raindrops falling on a puddle.

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

"You should be walking effectually in accented anaesthesia at all times that reality even exists," he says. "I'm having this mathematical awakening and all around us is absolute magic or about as shut equally yous tin 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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