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

by Padgett, Jason

  Elena’s mother somehow managed to be the most lively, pleasant woman I’d ever met despite the great hardships she’d faced raising a child during the fall of an empire. Despite her formidable, serious beginnings—she was one of the few female software engineers of her generation, and she had had to be tough to achieve that position—she was always lighthearted and cheerful. She told me that when she’d started in the industry, a single computer took up an entire room. She had seen so much. It didn’t matter if she was on a breadline or working as an engineer in a power plant that had no heat and, at one point, no roof overhead. She met each challenge with great personal strength and sacrificed a lot for Elena, particularly after Elena’s father grew ill. She reminded me of a little brown bird I’d once seen in Alaska. I was stacking supplies on a huge metal shelf in an industrial yard near the oil fields when I disturbed a nest filled with eggs. The mother bird swooped, then flopped to the ground and pretended to have a broken wing to pull my attention to her. I’d walk toward the mother bird, away from the eggs, and she’d fly back to the nest, and then she’d repeat the swooping and flopping when I approached the shelving and the nest again. Like that bird, Elena’s mom would risk anything to give her daughter a chance, would even work in unsafe conditions to support her family. Most remarkably, she never passed on any inner fear she might have had to her child. (She recently retired, after thirty-six years with the same employer.)

  Meeting Elena and her family changed my worldview. The geometry of the relationships among and within nations would never be the same for me. The lines that were borders on world maps faded in my mind.

  Despite the bleak surroundings and stories, I’d gone to Russia to win Elena, and so I decided I would bring as much joy as possible into her life while I was there. One of the first things I did was take Elena and two of her girlfriends bowling. This may be considered a blue-collar activity in the States, but it’s a really posh thing to do in the former Soviet Union, and I wanted to impress her. Things were going well until a drunk Russian police officer approached our group and said something about the women.

  Elena translated for me and I could smell the vodka on his breath as he teetered and glared. All I could think of was ending up in the gulag. According to Elena, he was challenging me to a bowling match. At least it’s not pistols at ten paces, I thought.

  I had seen a large, framed portrait of the reigning champion of the lane on my way in. The smiling man was surrounded by a CD player and other loot he’d won in their biggest competition. It said his average was a 160. Mine was a 200 back when I bowled. I quickly calculated that if the cop was a regular here and had been beaten by this guy, I had a chance.

  “Tell him I’ll bowl against him, Elena,” I said.

  With that, the cop’s eyes lit up and he reached for a bowling ball. He raised it over his head and began whipping it around in a circular fashion, shouting things that were lost to our translation system because we ducked instead of talking.

  Just as the ball was on the downward curve behind his head, momentum and gravity took over, and the policeman fell flat on his back. We tried not to laugh but it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. I kept my head down so no one could see my big grin.

  A second policeman approached our group, warned me not to kick his friend when he was down, and dragged him out of sight. Our date resumed.

  Part of the fun of traveling to Russia was meeting the people and learning to appreciate their challenges. I realized that there were vast differences between the middle and upper classes when I had to stand on a long, snaking line just to buy a bottle of water one day (members of the upper class never had to wait in lines). Just when I got to the front of the line, the cashier closed the register down and pulled a chain across it. Elena told me I should have stepped to the front of a second line that had formed, just jam myself in there like everyone else, but it didn’t feel polite to me.

  I got to meet a man named Vladimir, a neighbor of Elena’s family, who’d made a lot of money under mysterious circumstances in the new Russia and who enjoyed the power and privilege that goes with wealth. Our encounter happened just as it was nearly time for me to return to the States. Elena and I were standing outside my flat waiting for a taxi she’d called, as I would be staying in her family’s apartment for my last night.

  We’d handed the keys over to my landlady, and we had to stand in the thirty-below weather in our parkas for a few moments until the cab arrived. When the driver got a look at the big red satchel I was carrying he said, “Too big,” and sped off.

  We ended up having to walk in the frigid cold until we stumbled upon another cab by the side of the road. We arrived at her parents’ apartment building with ice crystals on our eyelashes.

  Stepping out of the shadows near the entrance to the building was the largest man I had ever seen.

  “Lena, what has happened? Why do you two look so cold?” he asked her in his booming baritone. She explained our harrowing tale and how we could have died out in the subzero weather.

  “Give me the name of the cab company,” said the man, who I would later learn was Vladimir. “I will handle this.”

  We learned the next day that not only had Vladimir gotten the driver fired, but the company withheld his Christmas bonus as well. The hulking Russian took a real shine to me on subsequent visits and bear-hugged me, slapped me on the back, and said, “I served in Cuba with the Soviet army, Jason! We are neighbors!”

  I would end up making four journeys to Russia before I convinced Elena she should return with me to the States and be my wife.

  I would have liked my proposal to have been more romantic, but it actually took place over the phone during one of our reluctant separations between visits. I told her I couldn’t bear to be apart from her and wanted to build a future with her in America.

  We were married on January 16, 2009, in Tacoma’s city hall with no one but a Planet Futon employee and the employee’s mother for witnesses. We were so happy—and so nervous—that we forgot to put batteries in our camera and have no photographs of the day.

  In the trajectory of our love affair, I learned to trust and open up to the world again. Elena saved me in every sense of the word. I finally had someone to live the unmathematical angles of my life with and share my deepest hopes. And so there were two new things I loved now: geometry and my Elena. I returned to work with greater purpose, wanting to build a better life with her.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Man from Planet Futon

  I WAS TRANSFORMED NOW that I had Elena to share my life. I couldn’t believe my good fortune most days as we planned our future, including starting our own family. With her encouragement, I was a little more relaxed around people and out in public. It had been seven years since the attack. It was still not easy at the store sometimes, because you never really knew who would walk in.

  It was funny to remember, given my skittishness about dealing with the public, that when I started selling futons out of my home in Alaska in the early 1990s, I had let all types of people through the front door for the sake of a sale. It was a far cry from the flagship Planet Futon store we would open in Tacoma in 2001. Back then, I ran a Yellow Pages ad and let customers come over at all hours to see the two models of futons from my dad’s factory I had set up in my living room. I was partying a lot in those days, but despite all the time I spent away from home or recovering from long nights out, I had a good business going. I was able to pay my rent and all my bills and put a good sum aside. It wasn’t long before I had enough saved to rent a little store in the local Anchorage mall big enough to display ten futons. I named that store Futon Gallery. Those were the golden days of futons. The popular TV show Friends caused a run on the item because there was one on its set. The things practically sold themselves, sort of like waterbeds did back in the day.

  I used to show up at the mall late—or whenever I wanted, really. The malls didn’t fine you the way they do today if you don’t open on time. I enjoyed the cust
omers, especially the women. I would pretend not to know which futon they were referring to just so I could whip out a muscular arm and point at pieces of the inventory. I can’t tell you how many times a pretty young woman would say, “Oh, look at your muscles. Can I touch them?” And of course I’d let her, because that was the point in the first place.

  But since the brain injury, I could not stand anyone except Elena and Megan touching me. As soon as a customer came in the store, I started sizing up his hygiene and homing in on where he put his hands, what he touched, if he touched the people he came in with, where he touched them, and which hand he covered his mouth with if he coughed or sneezed. I tried to keep at least two feet of space between a customer and me at all times and if anyone came an inch closer, I backed up.

  I knew that I looked uneasy so I tried to explain to some of them that I had profound OCD as a result of an accident. Most of them nodded but I don’t think many of them understood.

  In addition to being hyperaware of customers’ germs, I would not turn my back on any of them, out of fear they would try to hurt me. This was part of the posttraumatic stress disorder from the mugging, no doubt. As I was scanning customers for evidence of germs, I was also looking for signs of potential violence. Many victims of traumatic brain injury suffer from an inability to understand nonverbal communication, such as body language. I was obsessed with interpreting people’s behavior, so this wasn’t a problem for me.

  I’d had a couple of Skype conversations with the savant syndrome expert Dr. Treffert by now. It meant the world to me that the man I’d seen on television in the report about autistic savant and synesthete Daniel Tammet, which helped me know I was not completely alone, had become a guide as I navigated these waters. I hoped to meet him in person one day, but it would require taking time off from the store and flying to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Dr. Treffert is so revered in the field that people fly from all over the world—even the Far East—to his beautiful little midwestern town to see him. He explained that my intense focus on body language could be attributed to the increase in sensitivity and awareness that many acquired savants experience. He asked me a lot of questions because he was worried my sensitivity to other people’s behaviors might be compulsive. After discussing it with me, he said, “Sometimes the increased sensitivity is a gift and sometimes a burden, again, depending on how intrusive it becomes. In your case I would list this as a plus, and not a tradeoff.”

  It was mostly a plus, but sometimes it was a burden too. I began to notice that when I was with people, if someone was uncomfortable, I was often aware of that person’s discomfort long before anyone else in the room noticed. Or I’d sense someone’s boredom with whatever subject was being talked about. When I felt someone else’s embarrassment or boredom, I tried to change the subject or somehow change the dynamic of what was going on. Just like having OCD, it was a lot of work and a lot of worrying and very tiring to be on guard for not only myself but everyone around me at all times. I think Dr. Treffert would categorize that part as obsessive. So it did sometimes go into the negative area. If I had to rank the hierarchy of conditions in my head, I’d say that empathy trumped my aversion to germs in most cases—I didn’t want to make other people uncomfortable by obviously avoiding touching them. But sometimes my OCD did battle with my empathy when I applied antibacterial lotion on my skin right after shaking hands with someone. I knew I might embarrass people but I just couldn’t help it, and I would apologize profusely. When I thought about it, I realized I’d begun saying “I’m sorry” an awful lot.

  I was still having difficulty with written forms of communication. (Except when it had to do with math research; the obsessive drive to know more about math, particularly geometry, got me over any inability or lack of desire to read or write.) It was very frustrating to me because it was such a crucial part of my schooling and I needed the skills for business. But at the same time, I had this heightened sensitivity to nonverbal cues. Why wasn’t my whole ability to communicate wiped out? According to Greg Ayotte, the director of consumer services for the Brain Injury Association of America, communication is no longer believed to be localized in a particular part of the brain, and diffuse areas may get rewired and take over. State-of-the-art brain scans have shown that this sort of rewiring can happen in TBI survivors.

  The hyperaware parts of me were a new positive for my work at my current store, Planet Futon, in the sense that I could plan my sales approach from the moment customers arrived. I’d had plenty of practice with salesmanship since we’d opened the store in 2001, but since my brain injury, I found myself better able to read people. For example, if a sedan pulled up—no sale. A minivan was more likely to be a serious customer, and a pickup truck was a sure bet. If a couple walked in, I’d focus on the less open of the two, monitoring cues like crossed arms, which signaled being closed off. If they had kids and were buying bunk beds, I’d try to get them to upgrade to better memory-foam mattresses, knowing most parents will do anything for their children.

  Tacoma is not as economically prosperous as Seattle. There are a lot of people struggling to get by. I tried to meet them halfway by offering a no-credit-check policy. I made an arrangement with a finance company that would help customers with their purchases if they could provide proof of employment and had checking accounts.

  This began to draw in some hard-luck types who couldn’t make purchases at the bigger stores, and while I was really happy to be helping people, we took our share of hits from being so open. One woman bounced a check she wrote to us and when I phoned her, she said, “That’s impossible, I still have two checks left on the account!” Another woman was about to bounce her check and the bank called me; I deposited the forty-dollar difference so our sale would go through. The customer phoned me furious that her account had been wiped out, though she’d received a forty-dollar discount. When I explained that intentionally taking merchandise and writing a bad check on it was just like stealing, she said, “Oh, you big companies can afford it.”

  I had enjoyed sales much more in the past. So much of my time was now taken up policing things. But that didn’t mean it never got interesting. My best moments in the store became those spent talking about math and science, even with people who weren’t going to buy anything. It was a real joy to see people’s faces light up when they understood something, and I’d have to hone my own expertise on things when they asked difficult questions. Oftentimes I’d spend the rest of the evening reading things related to our conversations. It was one of my greatest pleasures to learn something new this way. It occurred to me that if I didn’t have an outlet to discuss this with the general public, I’d probably go mad. I purposely turned conversations to the subjects that interested me just to get through the day.

  I was alone in the furniture store one day when a brick wall of an ex-con walked in with his girlfriend and her two kids. “I want to know what’s so good about this store. They say you have deals. I need a bed,” the towering, totally bald man said. Though slight of build now, I thought back to my own days as a gym rat and figured the man weighed somewhere around 260 pounds, most of it muscle. I noticed the prison tattoos running up and down his arms.

  “I’m Jason, and I can help you,” I said nervously, still on guard with strangers.

  “I’m Jason too,” the customer replied. We chuckled at the coincidence, and the ice was broken. I couldn’t help myself after that. I launched into my life story and apologized for being distracted when he first walked in. I told the man that ever since being mugged, I preferred to think about math and science over just about anything else, futons included. The brain injury I suffered appeared to have given me unexpected gifts, I offered.

  The customer was staring wide-eyed. “I strong-arm-robbed a lot of people, but I never made nobody smarter!” He admitted he needed the bed because he’d just gotten out of prison and didn’t have one waiting for him at home. I caught myself swallowing hard and slow. “You know the worst part about being in prison?” the par
olee asked. I shook my head.

  “I didn’t get to smile for a year. I had to look mean. And I love to smile, don’t I?” He looked toward his girlfriend while her kids jumped up and down on a nearby mattress. She laughed.

  I started showing the man bed frames and box springs, walking backward to keep him in my line of sight. Trying not to stumble or look scared, I directed the conversation back to one of my comfort zones: the mathematical concept of pi. “Do you know that circles don’t actually exist? If you zoom in close enough, their perimeters are actually zigzags—hundreds and hundreds of tiny little straight lines that are so close together they visually blend into a smooth curve from our perspective.”

  “For real?” Big Jason asked.

  I went further, describing how if you fill in a circle with triangles, you can better measure its area, because there really is no curve to it at all. As I continued with the impromptu lecture, my customer’s eyes lit up with understanding. I was thrilled to see that look on his face.

  I carried on with the Doppler effect: “Imagine you’re on one street corner and I’m on the next, and a car is speeding past both of us,” I said. “I’ll hear it as one pitch and you’ll hear it as another, and overall it’ll make that weird nyeeeeeeruh sound.”

  The customer nodded. “I’ve heard that sound.”

  “The pitch is relative to your position in space.”

  “That’s all it is?” Big Jason looked scandalized. Then he reached into his pockets. “Don’t you hate it when you spend time with a customer and they don’t buy nothing?” the giant man teased.

  “N-n-no, it’s okay,” I stammered. I was thinking I didn’t care if the man bought anything as long as he left the store without hurting me. The customer pulled out a handful of wadded-up hundred-dollar bills and threw them on the mattress in front of us. “Well, I got the cash,” he said with a smile. I sold him a king-size mattress and frame for a thousand dollars.