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

by Padgett, Jason

  The man shook my hand and it was all I could do not to turn around and use the economy-size bottle of hand sanitizer behind the counter.

  “I come to Planet Futon for a bed and I get life lessons,” the ex-con said, his girlfriend and her kids trailing him out the door. “No circles, wow . . .”

  I quickly washed my hands, then locked the store, hurried out the back, and ran down the street to deposit the money in the bank, looking over my shoulder every thirty seconds. Big Jason hadn’t followed me.

  I slowed my pace and as I walked toward the parking lot, I glanced up at the sunset and noticed the curvature of the sky. The half-dome shape began to divide itself into triangles, the figures sliding into place and glowing in the twilight. The streetlamps flickered on, and their light rays fanned out into perfect circles before filling up with the same procession of subdividing triangles. I watched the traffic go by in a slipstream, the images trailing one another like a stack of Polaroids.

  My heart was still beating fast. I almost never felt completely out of danger interacting with that somewhat threatening stranger, but at least I completed the sale. That was a big moment for me and a sign of how far I’d come since my reclusive days.

  Another day, I was delighted when a very clean, well-dressed man of about fifty entered the store. He looked a lot more promising than most of my customers and I felt that he was neither unhygienic nor dangerous. It turned out he was a pastor.

  This gave me pause. My only association with organized religion until then was the Baptist church I’d attended with my grandparents for a time in Anchorage. They were evangelicals and there was a lot of threatening fire and brimstone shouted from that church pulpit that scared me away from their vengeful deity. Furthermore, the church battled the community where our home was, Hillside, by placing an illegal antenna in our neighborhood for their radio broadcasts. My mom headed the community group fighting to get it removed and was ultimately successful. Congregants started showing up in our front yard, cutting down tree branches and carting away our decorative stones for revenge. I was not a total disbeliever and knew not every congregation was like that; however, this had all soured me on being a churchgoer.

  The pastor was a polite and friendly man. I guess cleanliness really is next to godliness, as the saying goes, because he looked so fresh and pure, even by my exacting standards. I found myself sharing my story and listening patiently as he talked about the miraculous nature of my recovery. I told him I couldn’t argue that it was truly remarkable I was still walking around, much less experiencing my extraordinary new perspective, but I also told him that I had my share of questions about divinity being behind this. “I mean, if there is a God, didn’t the same deity who might be responsible for my amazing new life also allow me to be beaten to within an inch of my life in the first place?” I asked.

  “I have questions too,” the graying visitor said. This surprised me. I’d never known a clergyperson to admit doubts.

  “Here’s one of them,” he said. “If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, how is it that we also have free will? It doesn’t seem like these two things should coexist. God would already know the outcome, and if He knows it, how are our actions independent of that knowing and that power?”

  I agreed and quickly ran through the logic of how these ideas might be mutually exclusive—even this was a math problem to my mind, I noticed. I took out a piece of paper and a pen to draw it for him. I put an omnipotent God in a big circle, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t put people and their actions in a separate circle next to it; their actions just couldn’t be independent of that kind of force, I told him. The circles wouldn’t even just overlap; they would have to merge. I added that I couldn’t imagine an all-powerful Creator who, in giving us choices, would also have created evil. “An all-powerful God knew torture would happen, knew the Crusades would happen; heck, God even knew that I’d be mugged, and if that’s true, we are just pawns in that plan without real free will. I think evil exists to give context to the good, but if I were God, I would just let people know about evil in their imaginations and not give them the ability to act on it.”

  My visitor smiled and walked over to my drawings hanging behind the counter. “Did you do these?”

  “Yes. I have been drawing what I see in my head for several years now. That circle is pi, and that snowflake-like design is wave-particle duality.” I explained these concepts during what would turn into a three-hour conversation.

  “You say you can actually see these things?” he asked at one point.

  “Yes.”

  “This is a part of creation too, then.”

  “I suppose it is. To me, it is the fundamental structure of things.”

  “God must be quite a mathematician,” he said, shaking his head and putting his hands in his pockets. “I imagine your view of the universe is much larger than my own.”

  I told him, “It’s not universe, it’s universes, plural.” I explained that astronomers claim that there are about five hundred billion galaxies in addition to our celestial home—the Milky Way galaxy—and that according to string theory there are at least 10500 different universes. But then some physicists believe there are actually infinite universes. We started talking about the idea of parallel universes, with all possibilities existing somewhere in each their own realm. “There is a me talking with you here in one universe and at home taking a nap in another,” I said.

  The pastor didn’t buy any merchandise that day, but he shook my hand and thanked me for expanding his view of things. I was so flattered that I didn’t recoil from the touch. “I’m going to have to incorporate a lot of what you taught me today into my beliefs,” he said. “My universe just got a lot bigger.” And with that, he smiled and walked out the door.

  Talks like that can get me through the times when I am dealing with the mundane: paperwork and inventory.

  I was having a particularly busy but boring day doing just that when I saw a few high-school kids in marching-band uniforms staring at the beanbag chairs in the front window. I had purposefully put them there to entice younger customers and I saw it was working. They started spilling in, five of them flopping on the ones in the front of the store.

  “These are really comfortable!” said one.

  I decided to be a good sport. It was the most fun I’d probably have all day, after all. Their red, gold, and black uniforms were a striking display, as were the instruments they were carrying.

  “That’s because they’re made with foam instead of beads,” I explained. “The foam is actually a petroleum byproduct, so the price of those chairs fluctuates with the energy market.”

  “Cool!” said the boy holding the trombone.

  More and more kids started coming through the front door and flopping down on the chairs, as well as on the mattresses and the futons. I counted forty in all.

  “Isn’t that a fractal?” asked one bright sixteen-year-old boy, pointing to my drawings still on display on the wall opposite him.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I drew it.”

  “I thought only computers could make fractals.”

  “Well, I can make simple ones,” I explained.

  “What is that circle with all the lines through it?”

  “That’s how I see pi.”

  With that, we were off and running on a discussion of pi and even relativity. I explained the concept of the Doppler effect using the different pitches of sound from a speeding car, as I had with my ex-con customer. One of the boys said, “Wow. That just changed everything!” I couldn’t help but smile. We then slipped into talking about parallel universes.

  One boy turned to the young woman next to him and said, “Parallel universes means that I’m the hottest guy in one universe and just perfect for you out there somewhere.”

  She rolled her eyes and said, “Just not here!”

  I went on to explain how magnetic frequency affects our environments, on
ly to have one boy punch another in the arm.

  “Hey! Ouch!”

  “That was just the magnetism—it wasn’t me!” said the offender.

  The tuba player asked me if I’d ever played a musical instrument. I told him I had a piano at home and had taught myself how to play.

  “How did you manage that?”

  “I drew staff notations with the appropriate note for each key on pieces of tape and stuck them to the keys,” I explained.

  “Isn’t that harder than just putting the letters on them?”

  “I had to see where it was on the sheet music,” I offered.

  “Oh.”

  The kids were kinetic, talking among themselves and fidgeting constantly and throwing more questions at me. Then a man walked through the front door, and I noticed they grew quiet.

  “What have you done to my kids?” asked their band teacher. “I’ve never seen them so attentive!”

  Chapter Twelve

  Contact

  THINGS WERE BEGINNING to come back into balance, and my lopsided reality was evening out. I was inching closer to my bachelor’s degree—taking two night classes every semester, as I had to continue to work full-time. Elena helped me redecorate my fortress of solitude in Hilltop into something not just livable, but downright charming. It was the first time things had felt normal in years, perhaps ever. I was very hopeful about the future and holding on to each milestone as hard as I could. Don’t go back, I thought as I completed one exam, then one class, then two, then a semester. Never go back. Never give up. It’s not just about you now. It’s for Megan and Elena too.

  But sometimes the things we hold tightest in our hands slip through them, regardless of our effort or intentions. I’d completed the equivalent of my sophomore year when a distant domino effect brought my progress to a standstill: the physical trauma of the mugging in 2002 compounded by the whiplash of a minor car accident I had had that summer finally took their toll and erupted during an entirely mundane office activity.

  I was replacing one of the fifty-pound bottles in the furniture-store water cooler when I felt like I’d been hit by lightning on my left side. Seven years after the assault at the karaoke bar, I once again felt a sharp pain that brought me to my knees, and this time it left me on the floor, the water bottle missing me by inches when it fell. It was an electric, burning pain that ran from my neck down the inside of my left arm. My veins and nerves felt like power cords that were burning out in a burst of energy; just a hot, searing, burning pain. I never knew pain could be so severe. I was shaking.

  There was only one thought going through my mind as I lay there, and it was not my mortality or a concern about how I was going to earn a living if I was disabled. Rather, it was How am I going to draw and hold the ruler any longer? I drew with my right hand, it’s true, but I had to hold the ruler steady and firm with my left hand, pressing it down hard into the paper, in order to get the straightest lines and avoid errors. Sometimes I would sit like this for hours at a time, and it required some stamina to keep pressing from one side, shifting the ruler ever so precisely, then pressing down again for the next line. What if my left arm and hand no longer worked?

  If a severe illness or injury does one thing, it brings your priorities into diamondlike, laser focus. It had never been clearer to me that I had to draw, that I had to create, and that if I lost that ability, I would never be myself again. I knew I had a life before this one—a full and happy one in its crazy way—but I was no longer that man and I didn’t want to return to the life I’d had before I had these abilities. As a flurry of thoughts flooded my panicked mind, it was the memory of my drawings that made my heart leap into my throat.

  I realized in an instant how far I’d come. Even my four years of solitude didn’t feel like such a waste now that I was in school and connecting the dots between what I’d taught myself in that time and the accepted academic version of the same things. It was this realization of how far I’d come that helped me harness whatever strength I had and push myself up from the floor using my right arm. I tried to take a few steps; I was limping, I noticed. I gingerly made my way out of the store, climbed into my car, and made my way yet again to the local hospital.

  I began what would be a two-year quest for wellness, through physical therapy, prescription pain medication, and, ultimately, surgery, in which a disc between the vertebrae in my neck was replaced with a titanium disc. But in the beginning, for the first two weeks after the injury, I was almost bedridden. I could barely get up to go to the bathroom. I slept a lot, and when I was not sleeping I was grimacing with the slightest movement. I remembered my dad and all those awful pains he had in his back when I was younger. I felt guilty about not realizing the true severity of such pain. At the time, I’d wondered how it could really be as bad as he said. I have such empathy for people with back injuries now. Back injuries are hidden to all but their sufferers, I realized. If you have even a little paper cut, people can see the blood. But back pain is cruel in both its severity and invisible nature. The only people who really understood what I was going through were Elena and Megan. They remained incredibly caring and helpful as I struggled.

  I ultimately had to take a leave of absence from work and, worse, from Tacoma Community College. I could barely pick up a pen to do my school assignments. I could neither draw nor hold the ruler that was so crucial to my art. I was heartbroken.

  The loss was enormous, even compared with the loss I felt following my mugging. It was one thing to live a carefree life of partying and lose that. It was quite another to live a life in which you were aware of what was important and were close to achieving your goals and then have that taken away from you. I sank into a deep depression.

  Months passed, and I was stuck in front of the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel, attempting to keep learning in the only way I could. I watched more documentaries on black holes than I thought could possibly exist, practically memorizing Carl Sagan’s speeches in the process. Sometimes I watched the same program again and again, as many times as the channel repeated it, which was a lot. It hardly mattered if I’d seen it once or three times. It was all I had. Unable to work, I drifted deeper and deeper into debt. Elena was a full-time student, and it was important to me that she not quit school to work and support us. She’d been so good to me, and I wanted to make sure my problems didn’t affect her future.

  There was one bright spot in this low period. I had a consultation with a neurologist, since I was considering having surgery on my neck to alleviate the pain, and I was sitting in the waiting room looking at my drawings when other patients began to ask me what they were. I took out my closely guarded portfolio of finished work and set out to explain my story and the geometry and physics that were fundamental to my art. I noticed the receptionist looking up from her work periodically until she just couldn’t be silent anymore.

  It turned out she had studied a lot of math herself and she understood what I was trying to get across. She came out from behind her desk to have a closer look and complimented me enthusiastically on my abilities. Moments later, I heard the buzz of the office intercom and her voice saying, “Dr. Song, please come out here. You have to meet this young man in the waiting room.”

  The doctor emerged and looked through my work. He smiled and said he couldn’t wait to talk with me when it was my turn in his office. When that moment arrived, he asked me to tell him how I had been injured. I launched into my whole story. When I finished, he sat back and said thoughtfully, “Perhaps these abilities are due to the brain injury. You may have synesthesia and savant syndrome.”

  I couldn’t believe the words came out of the mouth of a medical professional. It had been my private theory for so long. I told him I did think that was the case and that I’d recognized myself in the program I’d seen, years ago, on Daniel Tammet. Hearing the doctor corroborate my theory about what was going on with me buoyed my spirit all the way home. When I got inside my house and had time to reflect, I realized what
I really wanted to do was celebrate by drawing something new. I was crestfallen when I couldn’t move my arm well enough to hold the pencil. Weeks of further isolation and depression ensued. Then the day of the surgery arrived.

  The only respites I’ve had from my constant visual images are the couple of times I’ve been completely anesthetized. That day was no different. I say completely anesthetized because at the onset of the anesthesia cocktail, I saw the images escalate. I remember feeling immobilized but seeing a circle rotating, spinning, and morphing into other shapes seconds after the IV drip was placed in my arm. Lots of other unbidden pictures also appeared, twisting to and fro, doing what they wanted. It wasn’t imagination; I wasn’t willing it. A little anesthesia made my impressions go crazy; a lot stamped it out. I woke up from my surgery thinking it was the only good sleep I’d had in a decade. I felt like a newborn baby and was practically giddy from the quality of the rest. I wished I slept well every night, but when I was falling asleep normally I went off to what I called fractal land. I’d see myriad shapes and colors while hypnagogic. And my dreams were often abstract and a continuation of seeing these forms; not many of my dreams were just stories or narratives. I think it was just my brain continually firing.

  When I finally resurfaced—on the other end of the operation to install the titanium disc in my neck—I returned to my job at Planet Futon but couldn’t afford to resume my studies. I felt the air go out of my lungs the day I did my budget to begin paying down my debt and realized that I just couldn’t fit tuition into the plan. I was devastated. I felt I was making important progress in school and I was now worried that my education was lost for good. But the months of calculus and trigonometry had left their mark, and the operation had left me well enough to begin drawing again. I decided there was no more time to lose. I felt confident enough in my remaining abilities to start sharing my drawings online through a YouTube video.