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

by Padgett, Jason

  There were two very important images to me at that time: one was of sine, cosine, and tangent waves and their reflections vibrating due to the speed of light making a space-time grid, and one represented fractal fusion. I’d become obsessed with the thought of the potential energy of geometry, and because these images represented that to me, I made sure I included both of them prominently in the video.

  I thought of the rendering just previous as a fractal of space-time at the quantum level. If you draw a straight line and call it a Planck length and then require that all points be exactly the same distance away (or whole-number multiples of the Planck length), the only way it can be drawn is as a straight line or a lattice. The quantized structure of energy and space-time actually requires that the structure at the smallest level be a lattice. To me, this fractal has a lot of mass (and energy), as in my mind, the number of lines indicates mass. I first saw the image that inspired this drawing in the physical world when watching sunlight glistening on a lake. While one can clearly see the light points at the center of each square, the rest of it grew from my imagination as I thought about what water would be like at a specific place in time on the quantum level.

  The next illustration shows particle fusion the way I imagine it.

  To my mind, the center hexagon is an inert iron core of a star and the six surrounding hexagons are the outer mass, collapsing toward the center (or the core) due to immense gravity. When they hit the core from all sides at nearly the exact same time, they fuse with the iron core and then rebound outward and explode as a supernova. Though this drawing shows the process as I see it, it is also a wish on my part. I dream about being involved in controlling fusion one day to create unlimited, clean energy.

  From my home, I videotaped myself drawing these fractals and uploaded a time-lapse video of them onto YouTube in early November 2010. I set the video to an upbeat Hindi melody that suited them. I felt that people should know how I draw things, step by step, and this was a good way to demonstrate that. Part of me also wanted a record of these drawings in case I had another health reversal or stroke of bad luck with an injury. I wanted to have visual evidence to help me remember what I was capable of. Even given my disappointment and renewed isolation, I felt very good about creating this. I threw in a couple of my other drawings for good measure.

  I was a little shaky at drawing so soon after my surgery. At first, I couldn’t press the ruler into the paper as firmly as I once did. My hand, wrist, and shoulder were still so sensitive. I had to push down the ruler with my left arm with a specific, firm amount of pressure so that it didn’t move, and I couldn’t quite feel the balance of it. Imagine holding your arm down on a table and pushing for hours. It’s a real workout from the shoulder through the wrist on a good day, and now it was too difficult. But I figured out that I could compensate for the decreased strength of my left arm and, by extension, the ruler by pressing more lightly with the pencil in my right hand. Pretty soon I was seeing some beautiful images take shape. They were in fact very steady and sharply rendered illustrations. I couldn’t really tell the difference in quality between the new ones and the ones I’d completed before my most recent injury. I was feeling euphoric that I was able to practice my passion again.

  In this soaring, happy state, it occurred to me as I pressed my pencil into the paper and continued drawing that I might be capturing sound in that process—kind of like pressing an old vinyl record. I was not sure how I came to this idea, but whenever euphoria strikes, I’m prone to such revelations. Actually, it’s a chicken-and-egg thing; perhaps the revelation rides in just ahead of the euphoria. But it obsessed me so much that I decided to be really careful about the background sound in my environment as I created the drawings. I chose songs that were meaningful to me, like “Telephone,” by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, as if I were communicating with a scientist from a future world who would be able to pull the sound out of my impressions one day. I played other songs that were appropriate to me, like “Mother,” by Pink Floyd, from the album The Wall. I very much related to that album. I put a YouTube video by Symphony of Science on, featuring audio by Carl Sagan and other top thinkers. It was called “We Are All Connected.” The innovative videographers behind it morphed Sagan’s speaking voice into song and so he sang, “We are a way for the universe to know itself,” and his intellectual heir, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, sang, “We are all connected, to each other biologically, to the Earth chemically, and to the rest of the universe atomically.”

  I daydreamed for a while about the archaeologist who might one day stumble on my drawings, pick them up, and carefully brush the dust off the folder. Would the device to pull the sound out of them look like a cell phone? Would it be a wand? And what about the pi drawings that Archimedes did in ancient times? If they were scanned one day in the future, perhaps the archaeologist could pull the sound out and hear the footsteps of the Roman regiment approaching Syracuse to sack the city and behead my hero!

  I snapped back to the present and put the finishing touches on my work. I turned off the audio accompaniment and decided my video was not half bad. In fact, it was really pretty provocative, I thought; I’d certainly have watched it if someone else had created it. I had a moment of doubt thinking that the people who were interested in such things were in the minority, and maybe it wouldn’t ever get any recognition because there were so few people who cared about the topic. I labeled the video with the keywords synesthesia and savantism, which my doctor suspected I had and which I personally believed I had, although that was still far from being confirmed. Had I made the video even more marginal with these obscure terms? They were the only clues I had about the person I’d become, so I decided the labels must remain.

  “Here goes nothing,” I said as I uploaded it and sent it out into the world.

  It bounced around the Internet that day and started picking up comments and interpretations and links like barnacles on a ship until finally it became a Google synesthesia alert. Alerts can be set up on Gmail accounts for practically any topic. Google cherry-picks content based in part on recommendations and then sends the results to interested people, I would learn, though I had no idea at the time that my video was spidering out across the web as I sat alone in my house.

  All the way across the country, in New York City, synesthete and journalist Maureen Seaberg found the Google alert e-mail in her in box. She had set the alert up a year ago to aid in research on a book she was writing on synesthesia. It’s one of several she received, but it immediately stood out.

  Maureen opened the video and was floored, she told me later. She’d never seen anything like my cross-sensory drawings, though she had synesthesia herself and knew what other synesthetes experienced, and she was very active in their community, speaking at conferences and writing on the topic. She knew that while she and her friends had extraordinary visual impressions, my orderly, highly geometric shapes were a world apart. Synesthetes see photisms—colored, moving forms that appear in response to stimuli—and mine were the most complex she’d ever seen. Further, they weren’t amorphous, like many photisms; they were crystalline and highly geometric.

  In 1926, psychologist Heinrich Klüver became the first researcher to catalog these photisms. He did so based on studies he conducted in which people took the psychoactive drug peyote and then described the synesthetic visions they saw. Dr. Klüver noted that most subjects reported seeing the same four geometric patterns—tunnels, spirals, lattices, and cobwebs. While some of my drawings were reminiscent of these general patterns to Maureen, they struck her as very special indeed.

  Klüver’s four general form constants: (I) tunnels, (II) spirals, (III) lattices, and (IV) cobwebs.

  My visions appeared to be several orders of magnitude more complicated and organized than those of the average synesthete, and Maureen was so excited she immediately wrote me an e-mail through YouTube under her 7synesthesia handle. It took only minutes for me to respond. I was so excited to once again discuss what
I see and think that our e-mail exchange lasted almost the whole afternoon. As Maureen peppered me with questions about the mugging and the visions it had engendered, she found a patient, enthusiastic subject eager to learn more about synesthesia. I asked her what her own experiences were and learned that she was born that way but didn’t have a name for what went on in her mind until she was twenty-seven. She found this ironic because she was a child of the 1960s and 1970s, like me, a time when the entire world was fascinated with the artificial kind of synesthesia that came from using psychoactive drugs but no one knew where to turn for information about the naturally occurring kind. It wasn’t until she stumbled on a book called The Man Who Tasted Shapes, by Dr. Cytowic (one of the pioneers of modern synesthesia research), that she discovered there was a name for what she experienced. She told me she sees colored letters, like a teal K and a terra-cotta R, and colored numbers, like a lemony 2 and an aubergine 8. She sees days of the week in color, like her indigo Wednesday and primordial-forest-green Saturday. Even months have color for her: February is not the garish pink of valentines but the blush of rose quartz. August is golden. I noticed that she was very specific about her colors. She hardly ever used a simple red or black, and I would learn later that other synesthetes are just as careful about describing the exact hues they see. In fact, the most respected test for the evaluation of synesthesia is neuroscientist and author David Eagleman’s online Synesthesia Battery, and Eagleman knew not to give multiple-choice answers for colors in the battery. Instead, he installed a custom color bar so synesthetes could put their cursors over just the right shades they see.

  When Maureen listened to music, she saw colored shapes, she explained. She tried her best to describe what Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach’s Prelude in G Major looked like but confessed she’d really have to be a glass artisan to demonstrate the molten forms of coffee tones she saw, “like those Christmas peppermints that fold over themselves like waves.” Through an online test, she told me, she’d recently discovered she had motion-to-hearing synesthesia, which meant she heard sound when she saw things move. I could hardly keep up with all the impressions. Though I’d read up on the subject on my own, I didn’t realize there were so many different varieties of synesthesia. What synesthetes all have in common is some sort of blending of the senses that each person can see only him- or herself, she explained. I realized I might have stumbled upon a community I didn’t even know I belonged to. Though synesthesia affects only 4 percent of the population, Maureen told me that there is a lot of interaction among synnies, as they like to be known, mostly thanks to the Internet.

  A synesthete was central to the formation of the World Wide Web, interestingly enough, she said. Robert Cailliau, of Belgium, and Timothy Berners-Lee, of Great Britain, were working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN; the acronym originally stood for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire). The term World Wide Web came about when Berners-Lee suggested it and Cailliau agreed because his synesthetic W was dark green, his favorite color! As a result of the web, she said, there are both formal organizations and loosely associated people on social media today all finding one another and comparing sensory impressions. I could see why those people might want to be in touch, as I was enjoying the shorthand Maureen and I were using in our e-mails. She had many questions and much information to share, but she got what I was saying more quickly than most nonsynesthetes because of the common ground we had. Perhaps most important, she took me at my word when I described what I saw. Since she had similar experiences, she believed me unquestioningly. She knew it was a thing.

  Elena and I were planning to fly to New York City, two weeks from the day I uploaded the video, while on our way to Boston to meet with planetarium makers who wanted me to consult on a project. They had found me through a mutual friend on Facebook and needed my advice on teaching fractal geometry to children in their presentation. I told Maureen, and she asked to meet with us while we were in her hometown of New York City. We exchanged phone numbers and regular e-mails, and when the day arrived we met for a casual lunch and the three of us got to know one another. I could tell she recognized the enormous scope of my experiences and the mysteries left in their wake. And she had a great day planned for me. After lunch we would meet with a literary agent and a filmmaker and then make our way to the United Nations, where a leader in the synesthesia community, Patricia Lynne Duffy, worked as an editor and trainer and had arranged a full tour for me! Duffy, the author of Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their Worlds, the first book about synesthesia by a synesthete, was the cofounder of a group called the American Synesthesia Association (ASA) and a big advocate for research into our shared abilities. Duffy saw colored numbers and letters and had a form of synesthesia I can’t even imagine: spatial sequence, in which the alphabet rose upward, left to right, when she visualized it, each letter always occupying a specific point in space. She was an expert in literary synesthesia as well, versed in the writing of both confirmed synesthetes and nonsynesthetes who created fiction with synesthetic characters. Her knowledge was encyclopedic, and I never would have guessed there were so many synesthete authors as well as nonsynesthete authors who find the ability so interesting that they give it to their characters in fiction. We also talked about a number of high-profile synesthetes who were coming out of the closet, like Billy Joel, Pharrell Williams, Geoffrey Rush, Tilda Swinton, Orhan Pamuk, and Itzhak Perlman, some of whom confessed their abilities for the first time ever to Maureen. She liked to out them, with their permission, to help erase the stigma of the syndrome. Duffy was a warm and welcoming woman, and she talked about everything from the organization of the United Nations to the stories behind the beautiful art lining the hallways. She even took my picture in the General Assembly, a photo I still treasure. She later said to Maureen, “It was such a fascinating talk and Jason was so genuine. I could see he was taking in the beauty of something immense and newly discovered. It was very touching.” By the time Maureen and I broke for dinner, I felt like it was a pretty great thing to be part of the community of synesthetes; it was actually an asset to count myself among these very creative and interesting people. I noticed I didn’t feel so lonely.

  A new friendship formed, and in the coming days, Maureen reached out in a white heat to other synesthetes and neuroscientists on my behalf, spreading the word about my case and carving out a path for me to continue my education. She was about to moderate a synesthesia panel at a Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Stockholm, and she invited me to present my case and my theories. I was happy to learn Duffy would also be there. Maureen contacted another participant of the conference, Berit Brogaard—a philosopher who studied cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language—to see if she would study me. Dr. Brogaard was a professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri in St. Louis and the director of the Brogaard Lab for Multisensory Research, which was affiliated with a top laboratory in Helsinki, Finland. Brogaard was immediately intrigued. After my week at the conference in Stockholm, I would fly to the lab in Helsinki. Brogaard had scheduled a series of tests for me at the Brain Research Unit, Low Temperature Laboratory (since renamed the O. V. Lounasmaa Laboratory), at Aalto University. A team of scientists would meet us there. Maybe I would finally get a firm diagnosis! Like Maureen, Dr. Brogaard was convinced I was a special case due to the sudden onset of my abilities after my injury. Perhaps it was also because, as I learned later, she herself had pain-to-color synesthesia and thought of pain as a purple mountain. She saw it with her own eyes, so she believed me when I told her what I saw. The synesthetes I was meeting were all receptive to me and didn’t find my impressions the least bit strange.

  I was almost back to the feeling I had had when I left for Russia for the first time: I hadn’t been out of my house much at all for months, and suddenly I was planning to go halfway around the world to talk about myself and finally get the proper tests I hadn’t had access to or the mon
ey for before. I began to wonder how my back would fare on the long flight to Europe, and I worried I wouldn’t even be able to stand up to exit the aircraft, much less stand on a stage and tell my story. I wanted the opportunity to participate in the conference and take the diagnostic tests so badly that I expressed nothing but enthusiasm, though. I prepared a strap and pillow to use on the plane that would keep my head in place so I wouldn’t hurt myself if I fell asleep. I started to deliberate which drawings to include in the talk and what to say.

  I left New York feeling hopeful and validated. Meeting my first synesthetes removed a lot of the doubts I had had about myself. I gained more confidence in my abilities from that meeting and was energized to do even more with my drawings.

  Maureen shared with me the written mission statement of the Center for Consciousness Studies—which is based at the University of Arizona in Tucson, though its conferences take place at various sites around the globe—so I would have a better sense of the concept behind the conferences.

  I learned that the science of human consciousness remains poorly understood. The dominance of behaviorism in psychology that stamped out interest in the once-popular topic of synesthesia also hurt the study of consciousness, but curiosity about the science behind both topics has risen recently. The University of Arizona has been key in these developments. The first Toward a Science of Consciousness conference, which took place in Tucson in 1994, was a landmark event. The conference has been held each year since then in locations around the world.

  It sounded like just the place to tell my story publicly for the first time. Maureen said that mind-body guru Deepak Chopra, physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick, and mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose would be present—all giants in the realms of philosophy, neuroscience, mathematics, or quantum physics. I couldn’t believe I was being transported from a futon store in Tacoma into their company.