Man Wakes Up From a Coma With a Strange New Skill That Has His Entire Family Puzzled

The fierce attack that turned a man into a maths genius

Futon salesman Jason Padgett cared lilliputian about annihilation beyond partying and chasing girls, then ane fateful night changed him forever.

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

"I don't know why I similar perfect squares," he says. "It's not but a perfect square, it's two to the ability of four or iv squared only I only like perfect squares… I automatically practice that stuff with everything."

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

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Just the sometime futon salesman from Alaska hasn't always had a way with numbers. Just under 17 years ago he was living a very different 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 confined again."

Maths wasn't on his radar whatsoever.

"I used to say 'math is stupid, how tin can yous use that in the real globe'? And I idea that was like a smart statement. I really believed information technology."

Only on the dark of Friday 13 September 2002 everything changed. (Read more about why some people get 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 piddling about maths, instead focusing on having fun before the assail that inverse the way his encephalon worked (Credit: Jason Padgett)

"I heard as much as felt this deep, low-pitched thud equally the first guy ran up backside me and smashed me in the back of the head," he recalls. "And I saw this puff of white low-cal merely like someone took a picture. The side by side 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 across the street where he was told he had concussion and a haemorrhage kidney thank you to a punch to the gut. "They gave me a shot of pain medication and sent me home," he remembers.

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

"I but remember nailing blankets and towels over all the windows in the house… I call up actually using this spray cream and gluing the front door close."

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

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

But while Padgett was experiencing all these negative consequences from his attack, something incredible was happening as well. The mode Jason was seeing things changed.

Following the fierce set on, Padgett withdrew from the outside world and adult obsessive behaviours (Credit: Getty)

"Everything that was curved looked like it was slightly pixelated," he explains. "Water coming down the drain didn't expect like it was a polish, flowing thing anymore, it looked like these footling tangent lines."

The same thing happened with clouds, sunlight streaming between trees and puddles. To Padgett, the earth essentially looked like a retro video game. Seeing such a radically unlike view of his surroundings evoked conflicting emotions in Padgett. "I was surprised…dislocated. It was beautiful merely information technology was also scary at the same fourth dimension."

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

He stumbled beyond a webpage about fractals which struck a chord with him. It's a difficult mathematical concept which, put at its most basic, can be likened to a snowflake. When y'all zoom in, you volition see it'southward made upwardly of smaller snowflakes connected together, zoom in again and those snowflakes are made of smaller snowflakes, and then on until infinity.

Padgett was fascinated by this concept but didn't yet have the words to depict it until one day his daughter asked him how the TV worked.

Since the assault Padgett has been able to describe repeating geometric patterns known equally fractals past hand (Credit: Jason Padgett)

"When you're looking at a TV screen and you see a circle it's really non a circle," he says. "It's made with rectangles or squares and, if you look shut, the edge of the circle is actually a zig zag. You tin can take those pixels and cut them in half and cut them in half and you get closer and closer to a perfect circumvolve but you never actually accomplish 1 because you can keep cutting the pixels in half forever, so the resolution gets meliorate only you never take a perfect circle."

Padgett felt compelled to explore this intriguing concept further. And then, 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 only fashion I could manage to communicate effectively what I was seeing."

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

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

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

"I'm trying to describe the discrete structure of space time based on Planck length (a tiny unit of measurement developed by physicist Max Planck) and breakthrough black holes," Padgett told him. It turned out the homo 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 customs college, where he began to learn the language he needed to describe his obsession.

After 3 and a half years of living like a virtual hermit, going to school changed everything for Padgett. He started to become psychological help for his OCD and fifty-fifty met the woman who would get his wife.

Simply why was he seeing things in such a strange and dissimilar fashion? Why was his world at present comprised of geometric shapes and graphs?

Poetically, information technology was tv that again provided him with a clue. Padgett saw a human, a then-chosen 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 past urging him to study mathematics (Credit: Jason Padgett)

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

He scoured the net for more than information and came across Berit Brogaard, a cerebral neuroscientist now at the University of Miami. The pair spent hours talking on the telephone and from these conversations, Brogaard hypothesised that Padgett had synaesthesia – essentially a cantankerous-wiring of the brain in which the senses get mixed up. (Find out more than about synaesthesia — and whether it tin be learnt).

It is estimated to effect only effectually 4% of the population. Some synesthetes might meet certain colours when they hear music or smell something that's non in that location when feeling a particular emotion.

The condition is caused by connections between 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, can change the brain.

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

"Nearly of us don't have that kind of insight considering we don't visualise mathematical formulas," says Brogaard.

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

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

"They found that I had admission to parts of the brain that we don't take conscious access to and also the visual cortex was working in conjunction with the role of the brain that does mathematics, which obviously makes sense," says Padgett.

Brogaard's hypotheses turned out to be 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 most his feel chosen Struck by Genius, he's toured the world telling people his story and educating them about maths. He is aiming to help others who have had unique or rare/interesting lives past getting their stories published or fabricated into movies. He even sells his drawings of fractals.

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

His unique fashion of seeing the world has immune Padgett to grapple with some of the almost circuitous mathematical bug (Credit: Jason Padgett)

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

"I'one thousand a completely different person," says Simmons. "When I look dorsum the abysmal person that I was in the past, I just don't run into how I existed on that level."

Padgett too feels similar he is a different person than he was before.

"I encounter it [beauty] everywhere," he says. He is mesmerised past simple things that virtually people don't even discover such as raindrops falling on a puddle.

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

"Yous should be walking effectually in absolute amazement at all times that reality fifty-fifty exists," he says. "I'm having this mathematical awakening and all around us is absolute magic or about as close equally 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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