A beautiful mind: how an assault turned a man into a maths genius

Jason Padgett was 31 when he was mugged outside a karaoke bar in Tacoma, a port city in Washington state, in 2002. It felt like his “head was on fire” from the blows that rained down on him. The two attackers made off with his jacket, but left behind the wallet they couldn’t find. The assault changed his personality. There used to be Jason 1.0. Now there is Jason 2.0.

Jason 1.0 was carefree. School never interested him; in his own words, he got terrible grades and lasted only a while in college before dropping out. His time was spent chasing thrills. If he skied, he couldn’t pass a cliff without jumping off it; if he scuba dived, it had to be with sharks.

At night, he partied. During the day, he ran a family futon business.

Something clicked
After the violent mugging in 2002, something clicked in him. About this time, his only brother disappeared; his body was found four years later. His stepfather, whom he idolised, died of cancer. Padgett spent four years holed up in his apartment. He called it his cave, venturing out only to get groceries. Part of its roof caved in, letting pigeons fly in and out.

His five-year-old daughter, Megan, was his sole regular visitor. He spent his time doing three things: running over memories in his mind; watching TV, mostly science documentaries; and surfing on his computer, absorbing information about maths and the geometric shapes that fascinated him.

Propelled out of his bolthole one day by a craving for a roast beef sandwich, a physics lecturer sitting close to him at a diner took an interest in his drawings. This led Padgett back to college, snapping him out of his seclusion.

While at college, he met Elena, a 20-year-old student from Russia. They married in 2009 and are expecting a baby girl in August.

Jason 2.0 is more sensitive to people’s feelings. He is better at interpreting body language. He looks at the world differently and captures it in his prizewinning drawings.

He sees Pythagoras’s theorem in the leaves of trees. Rainbows appear to him as a reflection of the infinite, irrational number pi. He marvels at the cream in his coffee every morning as it is stirred into his cup. Its perfect spiral reminds him of the repetitive geometric forms found all over nature, from seashells to the Milky Way galaxy.

“Imagine you’re watching TV and you keep hitting pause and you see images frame by frame. It’s like that for me,” he says.

“I see individual picture frames, but in real time. What I’ve learnt to do now is overlay a grid, like a piece of graph paper, on everything I look at. As long as I make that grid sufficiently fine, all the motions of everything that I’m looking at will line up with a vertex point on the grid so it will make everything look like it’s pixelated.

“The smoothness of everything is gone. Instead of clouds being slowly moving things that they used to be, now they have tiny, tangent-like edges around them.”

As well as the visions Padgett experiences, he taught himself to play the piano. He has prodigious powers of mathematical comprehension.

A financial firm in Toronto, Canada, wants him to apply his geometric reasoning to the stock exchange, but he has resisted its overtures.

Padgett is believed to be one of only 30 cases in the world with Acquired Savant Syndrome and the only case that also has acquired synaesthesia, a neurological phenomenon which causes the blending of senses. For example, numbers or days of the week might appear as colours in the mind’s eye. Billy Joel and Geoffrey Rush were born synaesthetic.

"Aspects of his presentation are very unusual," says Dr Simone Carton, principal clinical neuropsychologist at the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH) in Dublin.

“The savant is extraordinarily rare. I have not met a case after working with patients with acquired brain injury at NRH for 18 years.

“For the vast majority of people who sustain a brain injury, for example, following a stroke, a tumour or a traumatic event, including assault similar to Padgett’s, their priority is to walk and talk again and return to life as it was prior to their injury.”

Padgett’s reported clinical symptoms would be classified at the very mild end of brain-injury severity. He didn’t have to worry about walking and talking again. Instead, he developed many other symptoms associated with post-concussion syndrome – post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

“Following the mugging trauma, his reaction was shock and an intense sense of the world being an unjust place. Similar to other patients who experience a traumatic life event, this provoked in him a reprioritisation of his life: to pursue his interest in mathematics, go to college and form meaningful relationships.

“This is similar to many patients with brain injury who are able to reflect and evaluate their situation. They describe it as a ‘wake-up call’.

Debilitating
As well as new gifts acquired, Padgett suffers from debilitating side effects. He has battled PTSD, addiction to prescribed pain medication pills and late-onset depression, which hit almost a decade after his assault. The worst of it, however, are his OCD tics.

Every time he brushes his teeth, he has to run his toothbrush through the water 16 times. He can’t climb stairs without counting them. He can’t shake a person’s hand without wiping his hand afterwards with disinfectant, which likely stems from a PTSD-related distrust of strangers. After all the reckoning, though, he’s happier being Jason 2.0.

“I definitely prefer my life now,” he says. “The good far outweighs the bad. Every once in a while I miss that blissful ignorance. Basically all I did was go out and party and goof off. It was a simple life. It was fun, but it’s much better now.

“There are things I thought I could never understand. What created this? What is this mysterious thing called pi? How everything is connected to the universe is amazing.”

Struck by Genius, by Jason Padgett and Maureen Seaberg, is published by Headline. For more information about Jason Padgett's artwork, see fineartamerica.com