Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel

by Padgett, Jason

  It turns out that, according to the National Center for PTSD, there are about 7.7 million Americans who suffer from the condition. I was surprised to learn that not everyone who suffers a trauma gets PTSD. In fact, most people who live through some form of trauma don’t develop the condition. Why are so many people able to handle the stress while others, like me, can’t seem to get over it? Experts say that it depends in part on the intensity of the traumatic event as well as the amount of support a person gets afterward. But that’s not all. Genetics and past traumas can also play a role in the likelihood of someone developing PTSD.

  I was beginning to realize that my situation put me at higher risk for the condition. I had gotten injured in the mugging, felt like I had no control during the event, and wasn’t getting adequate support in the aftermath. At the time, I was so laser-focused on the mugging as the trigger for my PTSD that I didn’t even stop to think about how other life events might have contributed to the problem. It wasn’t until much later that I would realize that my parents’ numerous divorces and remarriages, the death of my infant son, and other family troubles might have had something to do with it too.

  It helped to read about other people in the same situation, and I hoped that one day I would get the help I needed. Even though I knew that seeking help would be good for me, it wasn’t enough to motivate me to act back then. I didn’t want to leave the house—my fear was truly disabling.

  Though I was very concerned for myself after reading about PTSD, I felt that the greater mystery was my new visions and abilities. I’d never heard of anyone who experienced the things that were happening to me. At the same time, I was also becoming fascinated by the greater cosmos and wondering how I, and my consciousness, fit into the whole universe. I even broke my self-imposed exile briefly and bought a telescope from Costco to look deeper into the galaxy; I peered out at the night sky from my darkened living room.

  I was filled with questions about everything from outer space to my inner space. I wondered if there were even words to describe what was happening to me.

  Chapter Five

  Compounded Losses

  INITIALLY, SOME SERIOUS distractions kept me from having to face the profound changes my mind had undergone. My mother called the day after the mugging, and once I had relayed my own bad news, she told me my stepfather had lost his fight with cancer the same night that I was attacked. To lose my stepdad was a very deep blow. He may not have been my biological father, but he was the one stepfather of many I had who was as much a father to me as any man could be. He was a happy force and a stabilizing influence in my life from the age of twelve onward. My fractured family consisted of divorced biological parents with multiple remarriages between them, but this man, Captain Steve Smith, my hero, was not just passing through. He was a real father figure and mentor. I felt devastated and very much alone.

  Captain Smith was a Special Forces operative in Vietnam who was shot down twice during his tour of duty. He liked to say stoically that he got a vasectomy courtesy of the Viet Cong during one of these attacks: a chopper he was in was shot at, and shrapnel from the artillery that blew off his pilot’s head landed between his own legs. He managed to fly the chopper ninety miles and get it to a safe area before it went down. The other time he was shot down in a helicopter, he found himself in a field surrounded by the enemy. Thrown from the vehicle, he nonetheless made it back through heavy fire to blow the chopper up, as it was carrying sensitive equipment. A friend of senators and high-ranking military officials, he instilled in me a strong work ethic.

  He also gave me my first exposure to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Captain Smith ran such an orderly household that when dining-room chairs were moved to new positions, he made my brother and me rub out the previous marks in the carpeting. Even with this tic, he inspired me to be more self-sufficient. He did not give me a lot of material things, but he provided a strong example of personal responsibility and mettle. There would not be a funeral, my mother said—Captain Smith wanted to be remembered the way he had been.

  He was the one person I probably needed most in the world right then, someone strong who would help me find the men who had done this to me. If anyone could have found my attackers and brought them to justice, it was Steve. I let that thought guide me in my next move.

  That day, the day after the mugging, I called a few friends and we gathered to make posters stating that the karaoke bar was involved in the cover-up of a violent crime. We drove to the bar and marched out front until a television news crew showed up. Between the journalists covering the story and my group informing several dozen patrons showing up at the business what had happened the night before—several of them turned on their heels and left; some went in and gave the management an earful—we eventually got the owner to come outside. At first he was angry and called the police on us, thinking that we were disturbing the peace and that we were not allowed to protest. The police came and said that we were not breaking any laws, shook my hand, and left. Minutes afterward, the restaurant owner provided me with the names and addresses of the attackers and asked us to leave. We did.

  For the next five days I tried to get police to respond to my calls about the incident, with no success. Just two weeks after my mugging, Tacoma police chief David Brame would shoot and kill his wife and then himself in front of their kids while seated in the family car in a grocery-store parking lot. Eleven months later, the FBI would descend on the city to investigate allegations of police corruption and illegal business transactions by government officials. To say that the crime against me happened in a strange policing environment is an understatement. I didn’t know what was going on at the time; I just knew I was getting nowhere asking for help. So I did surveillance on the attackers’ home myself and found they were roommates and that they were packing up to move. I was so angry, I pulled my car up on their lawn just four feet from their front door to announce my arrival. I knocked on their door and told all who passed what the occupants had done to me. I told neighbors to call the police; the men were wanted for a violent crime. One of the assailants answered the door and began to shake and stutter as he tried to stare me down. A squad car showed up, and the police questioned him with me by their side. This time, the police treated the situation differently. The man admitted to the crime, claiming they were drunk that night. It came to light that two women employees of the bar, one of whom was the bartender who’d eyed my wallet, were dating the thugs. He was arrested on the spot and the other one was tracked down later that day.

  I collapsed with relief when I heard the police had both men in custody, but my relief was short-lived. With the capture of my attackers accomplished, I now had time to think about what had happened to me and to my stepfather, and a depression began to set in. I was so immobilized by grief I took some time off from Planet Futon to regroup. At first I thought it would be just a couple of weeks. Then weeks turned into months. Three months into my isolation, I got a phone call from my brother John’s live-in girlfriend, Keri. It was the day after Christmas, and I’d barely acknowledged the holiday. “We had an argument,” she explained when she called; she was checking to see if I had heard from John. “He put out the garbage and tracked in a bunch of water. I yelled at him and he said, ‘I can’t do anything right!’ before grabbing some pills and a blanket and walking out the door. I’m really worried. I think something terrible has happened.” He’d been missing almost twenty-four hours.

  “You know my brother,” I countered. “He’s walked out before and he’s always made his way to a nice hotel. John likes his creature comforts. He’ll come back eventually.”

  I was pretty sure John would turn up, but I still spent some time over the next couple of weeks working down a list of phone numbers of my brother’s friends and associates. He’d never been gone more than a week before. Sometimes when I looked at the phone numbers, I’d see different shapes for each number. I’d see cubes for individual numbers, and if I stared at the whole strand of numbers, th
ese big crystal grids would form before me or in my mind’s eye. I would lose myself pondering this bizarre imagery for a while, then snap myself out of it and go back to working down the list. I was as determined to find my brother as I had been to find the men who mugged me. Several times I called people at inappropriate hours, unaware of what day of the week it was, much less what time. I had not yet returned to work, I had no real routine, and I was beginning to lose track of time. No one seemed to have any information.

  My mind was also flooded by memories of my brother. Two things occurred to me: First, my long-term memory was apparently intact. I could remember back to our days as toddlers very clearly. And second, these memories were smooth as they played, like movies in my mind. My present-day perceptions were choppy and stop-action and overlaid with strange shapes, but the memories appeared just as I used to see the world. I would get lost in them over and over. It was much less exhausting than considering the present. They also brought me back to a time when John and I were close. I remembered the day I almost drowned and John tried to save me. I wanted to repay the brother who had rushed to my aid when we were small, even though we’d drifted apart in recent years. I picked up the list of phone numbers and worked down it again. No one had heard a thing.

  One morning I woke with the belief that John was dead. It hit me like a truck. My mind was different since the attack, and I didn’t always react in a timely fashion. I couldn’t even choose among various cans of corn on a supermarket shelf back then, and I still tend to ask people around me for help with decisions. Before the mugging, I always knew what I wanted and I’d walk through walls to get it; now, except for the emergencies of solving my mugging and finding my brother, I just wanted to hide behind walls. Keri had immediately known that something was very wrong when John left, and I had shrugged it off.

  One day, I lay in bed thinking about my brother being dead, my stepfather being dead, and what had happened to me. Suddenly I snapped.

  I jumped up and pulled my blankets off the bed and frantically ran for my toolbox. I took out the hammer and went window to window nailing the blankets over the frames to block out the world. When I used up those blankets, I went to the linen closet and got more blankets and sheets and worked my way around the rest of the house. My heart was pounding in my chest and I began to sweat. I was so manic that I tripped over the fabric a few times in my haste.

  The last clouds I saw, before covering up the final window, had discrete components, a stream of still pictures, each one slightly different than the last, as the cumulus forms changed shape in the wind. I paused momentarily to consider them, teetering on my stepstool with vertigo from the impression, and then I hurriedly got back to my mission. In my altered perception, motion still occurred in stop-action frames. It was as though the great animator of us all had pulled the veil back to show me the individual sketches that, when streamed, gave movement to everything.

  I wondered where John’s body was, and if I hadn’t been so afraid of stepping outside my house, I’d have conducted a search myself. Terrible images of his lifeless form began flashing through my mind. I was reeling from the compounded losses and overwhelmed by a need to hide. After I finished with the blankets and sheets, I checked the chains on the doors multiple times and wedged brooms and bats against the undersides of the doorknobs as early-warning devices. I looked inside all the rooms, even opening the closets and pushing things aside to make sure no one was lurking in them. Then I repeated the sweep, somewhere between five and ten times in all.

  I was aware of my blossoming OCD during this frenzy. In addition to checking and rechecking the locks, I’d been checking over and over to make sure the stove was off, washing my hands raw, and peering out the windows suspiciously several times a day. Unlike the other things going on with me, OCD was something I’d heard of; I knew it was related to anxiety, but I was powerless to stop it. I became a hyperaware sentry in my own home.

  In the days that followed, in my darkened cave, I decided I would stop going to work at Planet Futon altogether and live off my savings. While my dad was concerned about me, he was also very upset that I was quitting, and he tried to talk me into going back. I couldn’t snap out of my agoraphobia. One of our salespeople took over the management of the store. When I needed groceries, I slipped out at three in the morning and filled the car to overflowing so I wouldn’t have to go out again for several weeks, checking my rearview mirror constantly on the way home to see if I was being followed. The light of the grocery store, bright by anyone’s standards, was blinding to me. I seemed to be developing photosensitivity from my isolation in the house. All people seemed suspicious to me after the attack, and the people in the store just jabbered on and on nonsensically. Their mundane world of appointments and coupon-clipping and idle talk on the checkout line didn’t interest me. In retrospect, I realize I must have seemed pretty strange to them—looking over my shoulder constantly and scooting from the aisle if anyone else came down it. I mostly subsisted on Pop-Tarts and breakfast cereals and frozen pizza rolls. I’d never really been one to cook because I spent most of my nights out in clubs that served bar food or dinner. I hated going to the supermarket, and if I could have forgone food altogether and stayed in my isolation, I would have. But I was afraid to have food delivered by strangers, and home delivery was too expensive for my budget anyway, so the shopping trips were a concession, an unavoidable risk. Though I formerly had had a healthy appetite, now it was gone; I ate very little, rationing my provisions to postpone those forays into the now-surreal market. I didn’t care what anything tasted like. I would eat once a day, just to prevent hunger pangs. My once-muscular frame began to wither away.

  Before I retreated permanently to my house I’d gone to the barbershop and said, “Cut it all off!” My eyes started hurting from the hours I spent researching online, so I dug out an old pair of reading glasses and began wearing them all the time. I looked in the mirror one day and didn’t recognize myself. I wanted to hide from that realization as much I wanted to hide from the outside world.

  Perhaps my darkened enclave was a womb of sorts; a cocoon where I could transform before I went out into the world as a new person. I didn’t know how to be that new person yet. Was this person a crime victim? Was he a brain-injury sufferer? Would the new visions I was having define who I became? I was able to compare the me from before the mugging and the me after it, and they didn’t match up, which was very confusing to me. I had trouble identifying with the fun-loving young man I knew I’d been before the attack. Now I felt like I had developed a completely different personality, changes well beyond the new visual abilities. I thought back to Phineas Gage, the brain-injury survivor who was described as being “no longer Gage.” Was I no longer Jason?

  It was hard to let go of the old me. In the beginning, I mourned the loss of my old familiar feeling of self, which was only a memory now. I’d been a popular guy with lots of friends and I’d had plenty of fun times, from going out on dates to clubbing. I couldn’t imagine doing any of that now, though sometimes I still wanted to be out there engaging with the world. I remember seeing a weather report on television during that time showing people playing at a swimming pool. Part of me wanted to be out there having fun, but the rest of me just couldn’t move to do it. I thought enviously about cases of amnesia I’d heard about. It would be so much easier to accept this new me if I didn’t have to remember who I once was.

  I took out some old Polaroids and marveled at this other self from the past; gone were the muscle T-shirts that best displayed my bulging biceps, and gone was the spiky fade haircut. The man holding these images had adopted a studious, bespectacled, but toned-down look, and I wasn’t quite sure why. I wasn’t the carefree boy in those photos any longer. I had too many unanswered questions about my brain and consciousness and reality.

  While I couldn’t change who I now was, there were steps I could take to better enable me to face the world as my new self. I decided to learn as much as I could about my med
ical situation and hopefully take small steps toward embracing the diagnosis, whatever it might be. At the same time, I knew I needed to learn all I could about science and math to help me understand the strange new phenomena before my eyes.

  I was seeing shapes and grids that I couldn’t understand, as well as bright horizontal lines that would appear from moving objects. At first, I wondered if they were hallucinations. I’d never seen anything so strange and beautiful. But in my core, I felt the visions might be more profound than that. Perhaps they were manifestations of deeper patterns that had always been present in nature but that had been hidden from me up till now. They certainly opened up the world in a new way. It was as though I’d lived all my life in a Magic Eye poster, seeing only the obvious picture; now the hidden image was all I could see. I began to see and think about the geometry of everything. The mysteries of the universe were beckoning a man who had never even thought about them before.

  I was unaware of this at the time, but in the silent recesses of my skull, my brain was working to heal itself, forming new neuronal connections to compensate for the ones that had been damaged. As my interests began to change and my personality moved from outgoing to bordering on antisocial, my brain was actually recovering in a miraculous way. This updated wetware, as some scholars and theorists refer to the human brain, would go on to make me capable of the biggest intellectual leaps I had ever taken. It would go on to be my bright side. But first, it locked me away from the rest of the living world.