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Real 'Beautiful Mind': College Dropout

Became Mathematical Genius After
Mugging (PHOTOS)
April 27, 2012
By ABC NEWS via NIGHTLINE

Man Becomes Genius After Head Injury

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By NEAL KARLINSKY and MEREDITH FROST

Working behind the counter at a futon store in Tacoma, Wash., is not the place you would
expect to find a man some call a mathematical genius of unprecedented proportions.

Jason Padgett, 41, sees complex mathematical formulas everywhere he looks and turns
them into stunning, intricate diagrams he can draw by hand. He's the only person in the
world known to have this incredible skill, which he obtained by sheer accident just a decade
ago.

"I'm obsessed with numbers, geometry specifically," Padgett said. "I literally dream about it.
There's not a moment that I can't see it, and it just doesn't turn off."
Credit: Courtesy Jason Padgett

Padgett doesn't have a PhD, a college degree or even a background in math. His talent was
born out of a true medical mystery that scientists around the world are still trying to unravel.

Ten years ago, Padgett was only interested in two things: working out and partying. One
night he was walking out of a karaoke club in Tacoma when he was brutally attacked by
muggers who beat and kicked him in the head repeatedly. Padgett said they were after his
$99 leather jacket.

"All I saw was a bright flash of light and the next thing I knew I was on my knees on the
ground and I thought, 'I'm gonna get killed,'" he said.

At the time, doctors said he had a concussion, but within a day or two, Padgett began to
notice something remarkable. This college dropout who couldn't draw became obsessed
with drawing intricate diagrams, but didn't know what they were.

"I see bits and pieces of the Pythagorean theorem everywhere," he said. "Every single little
curve, every single spiral, every tree is part of that equation."

The diagrams he draws are called fractals and Padgett can draw a visual representation of
the formula Pi, that infinite number that begins with 3.14.
Jason Padgett's drawing of Pi. Credit: Courtesy Jason Padgett

"A fractal is a shape that when you take the shape a part into pieces, the pieces are the
same or similar to the whole. So say I had 1,000 pictures of you, that were little and I put all
those little pictures of you in the right spot to make the exact same picture of you, but
bigger," he explained.

Much like the mathematician John Nash, played by Russell Crowe in the 2001 film, "A
Beautiful Mind," researchers believe Padgett has a remarkable gift. To better understand
how his brain works, Berit Brogaard, a neuroscientist and philosophy professor at the
Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and her team flew Padgett
to Finland to run a series of tests.

A scan of Padgett's brain showed damage that was forcing his brain to overcompensate in
certain areas that most people don't have access to, Brogaard explained. The result was
Padgett was now an acquired savant, meaning brilliant in a specific area.

"Savant syndrome is the development of a particular skill, that can be mathematical, spatial,
or autistic, that develop to an extreme degree that sort of makes a person super human,"
Brogaard said.
Credit: Courtesy Jason Padgett

Padgett said his goal now is to get out of the furniture store and into the classroom to
hopefully teach others that math is as beautiful and natural as the world around us. When
asked if he thought his talent was a burden or a gift, Padgett said it was a mixture of both.

"Sometimes I would really like to turn it off, and it won't," he said. "But the good far outweigh
the bad. I would not give it up for anything."

Credit: Courtesy Jason Padgett

A Beautiful Mind: Brain Injury Turns Man
Into Math Genius
By Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer | May 5, 2014 11:39am ET
Jason likes drawing circles made up of increasingly many triangles, what he refers to as an illustration of
pi.

Credit: Courtesy of Jason Padgett

In 2002, two men savagely attacked Jason Padgett outside a karaoke bar, leaving him with a
severe concussion and post-traumatic stress disorder. But the incident also turned Padgett into a
mathematical genius who sees the world through the lens of geometry.

Padgett, a furniture salesman from Tacoma, Washington, who had very little interest in
academics, developed the ability to visualize complex mathematical objects and physics concepts
intuitively. The injury, while devastating, seems to have unlocked part of his brain that makes
everything in his world appear to have a mathematical structure.
"I see shapes and angles everywhere in real life" from the geometry of a rainbow, to the
fractals in water spiraling down a drain, Padgett told Live Science. "It's just really beautiful."
[Album: The World's Most Beautiful Equations]
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Padgett, who just published a memoir with Maureen Seaberg called "Struck by Genius"
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), is one of a rare set of individuals with
acquired savant syndrome, in which a normal person develops prodigious abilities after a severe
injury or disease. Other people have developed remarkable musical or artistic abilities, but few
people have acquired mathematical faculties like Padgett's.

Now, researchers have figured out which parts of the man's brain were rejiggered to allow for
such savant skills, and the findings suggest such skills may lie dormant in all human brains.

'Struck by genius'

Before the injury, Padgett was a self-described jock and partyer. He hadn't progressed beyond
than pre-algebra in his math studies. "I cheated on everything, and I never cracked a book," he
said.

But all that would change the night of his attack. Padgett recalls being knocked out for a split
second and seeing a bright flash of light. Two guys started beating him, kicking him in the head
as he tried to fight back. Later that night, doctors diagnosed Padgett with a severe concussion and
a bleeding kidney, and sent him home with pain medications, he said.

Soon after the attack, Padgett suffered from PTSD and debilitating social anxiety. But at the
same time, he noticed that everything looked different. He describes his vision as "discrete
picture frames with a line connecting them, but still at real speed." If you think of vision as the
brain taking pictures all the time and smoothing them into a video, it's as though Padgett sees the
frames without the smoothing. In addition, "everything has a pixilated look," he said.
"I see this image in my mind's eye, now in 3-D, every time imagine how my hand moves through space-
time."

Credit: Credit: Courtesy of Jason Padgett

With Padgett's new vision came an astounding mathematical drawing ability. He started
sketching circles made of overlapping triangles, which helped him understand the concept of pi,
the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. There's no such thing as a perfect circle, he
said, which he knows because he can always see the edges of a polygon that approximates the
circle. [Gallery: See Padgett's Amazing Mathematical Drawings]
Padgett dislikes the concept of infinity, because he sees every shape as a finite construction of
smaller and smaller units that approach what physicists refer to as the Planck length, thought to
be the shortest measurable length.

After his injury, Padgett was drawing complex geometric shapes, but he didn't have the formal
training to understand the equations they represented. One day, a physicist spotted him making
these drawings in a mall, and urged him to pursue mathematical training. Now Padgett is a
sophomore in college and an aspiring number theorist.

Padgett's remarkable abilities garnered the interest of neuroscientists who wanted to understand
how he developed them.

Beautiful mind
Berit Brogaard, a philosophy professor now at the University of Miami, in Coral Gables, Florida,
and her colleagues scanned Padgett's brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
to understand how he acquired his savant skills and the synesthesia that allows him to perceive
mathematical formulas as geometric figures. (Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which one sense
bleeds into another.) [Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind]

"Acquired savant syndrome is very rare," Brogaard said, adding that only 15 to 25 cases have
ever been described in medical studies.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging measures changes in blood flow and oxygen use
throughout the brain. During scans of Padgett, the researchers showed the man real and nonsense
mathematical formulas meant to conjure images in his mind.

The resulting scans showed significant activity in the left hemisphere of Padgett's brain, where
mathematical skills have been shown to reside. His brain lit up most strongly in the left parietal
cortex, an area behind the crown of the head that is known to integrate information from
different senses. There was also some activation in parts of his temporal lobe (involved in visual
memory, sensory processing and emotion) and frontal lobe (involved in executive function,
planning and attention).

But the fMRI only showed what areas were active in Padgett's brain. In order to show these
particular areas were causing the man's synesthesia, Brogaard's team used transcranial magnetic
stimulation (TMS), which involves zapping the brain with a magnetic pulse that activates or
inhibits a specific region. When they zapped the parts of Padgett's parietal cortex that had shown
the greatest activity in the fMRI scans, it made his synesthesia fade or disappear, according to a
study published in August 2013 in the journal Neurocase.

Brogaard showed, in another study, that when neurons die, they release brain-signaling
chemicals that can increase brain activity in surrounding areas. The increased activity usually
fades over time, but sometimes it results in structural changes that can cause brain-activity
modifications to persist, Brogaard told Live Science.

Scientists don't know whether the changes in Padgett's brain are permanent, but if he had
structural changes, it's more likely his abilities are here to stay, Brogaard said.

The savant in everyone

So do abilities like Padgett's lie dormant in everyone, waiting to be uncovered? Or was there
something unique about Padgett's brain to begin with?

Most likely, there is something dormant in everyone that Padgett tapped into, Brogaard said. "It
would be quite a coincidence if he were to have that particular special brain and then have an
injury," she said. "And he's not the only [acquired savant]."

In addition to head injuries, mental disease has also been known to reveal latent abilities. And
Brogaard and others have done studies that suggest zapping the brains of normal people using
TMS can temporarily bring out unusual mathematical and artistic skills.

It's always possible that having savant skills may come with trade-offs. In Padgett's case, he
developed fairly severe post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and he
still finds it difficult to appear in public.

Yet Padgett wouldn't change his new abilities if he could. "It's so good, I can't even describe it,"
he said.