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

by Padgett, Jason

  Perhaps the biggest side effect of my depression was that I was unable to handle confrontation at the store. There were plenty of opportunities for conflict, from the colorful customers to the sales and delivery staff. I found myself withdrawing and needing more and more time on my own. But it was more than that—I was withdrawing from even benign encounters now. Only a few months after meeting Maureen in New York and only a few weeks before the Stockholm conference, I stopped returning Maureen’s calls and e-mails. I felt bad about it, especially when she was so intent on helping me. I didn’t know if anyone understood, but despite my general empathy and sympathy for other people, I was closing off. The walls were going up around me. I made time for Elena and Megan and not much else. I know they were worried about me. And I worried and still worry a lot about them. Megan had been brought to tears a couple of times by my health problems. I began to think that it must be weird living with me. I knew they loved me, and I loved them. But I also knew it was hard for them and tiring to hear about my issues all the time—both the euphoric math monologues and the downtimes when I didn’t feel well. In fact, I’d begun to make it a point to talk less about these things around them, even though I couldn’t help myself a lot of the time.

  One night when I was lying in bed, I began to think about how much easier it would be to just be dead. I was alarmed by this thought. I’d never felt this way before. How could this be happening now, when I was on the verge of a breakthrough with the upcoming conference and diagnostic testing? I even thought about using the gun I usually took with me to the store for self-defense. It was as though I had two minds: one that wanted to harm me and one that wanted to protect me. When I started thinking about the gun, I realized I needed help and went to the emergency room at the local hospital, and they kept me for six hours. Once they were convinced I was past the worst of it, they released me. I took the bullets out of my gun and put them in one end of the house; the gun with its empty chamber I put in a safe in the opposite end of the house. I didn’t want to act on this thought that bubbled up, and I was not taking any chances. The walk I would have to take from one end of the house to the other might be enough time for the bad thoughts to dissipate. I was shocked and ashamed that it had come to this sort of thinking.

  At this point, I began therapy. The trip to the ER was the last straw. I had insurance for the first time in years and could finally seek some help. My doctor put me on the antidepressant Zoloft. Three days after starting it, I woke in the middle of the night. I was hyperventilating and having a full-out panic attack again. I just couldn’t catch my breath and I was sweating profusely. I paced the floors, trying to walk it out, as though it were only additional energy and I could just burn it off. Not wanting a six-hour stay in the emergency room again, I decided to wait it out. It felt like an eternity until my doctor’s office opened at nine. He told me this could possibly be a side effect of the medicine. He weaned me off the pills and we tried the antianxiety medicine Xanax as well as talk therapy for a while instead. I began to feel more stable.

  I learned that the pain medications I had been on could also have depressive side effects, so I had my doctor wean me off Dilaudid. Dilaudid is a very strong opioid drug and terribly addictive. It’s a derivative of morphine, and it’s a narcotic. They had put me on morphine in the hospital but I immediately suffered morphine headaches and needed a change. The withdrawal from Dilaudid was one thousand times harder than when I gave up chewing tobacco years ago. I had the worst withdrawal symptoms, from bowel problems to the shakes. My skin burned like I was on fire then switched to freezing. I would sweat and simultaneously feel like there were icicles hanging off me, the hot-and-cold cycles were so rapid.

  I meditated regularly to lessen the side effects and headed back to my computer to find out if my depression could have anything to do with my brain injury. A few clicks on my keyboard and I quickly realized that depression is one of the most common symptoms of TBI. In fact, some statistics show that more than half of all TBI survivors develop the mood disorder within the first year, and nearly two-thirds have it within seven years. Somehow, I had made it almost ten years before falling into its clutches, but I learned that, like all TBI survivors, I would be at increased risk for depression for the rest of my life. According to some reports, I was ten times more likely to have it at some point during my lifetime than a person without a brain injury.

  Why is depression so common after a brain injury? I wondered. Researchers are still trying to figure it out, but they’ve suggested many possibilities. In some people, there may be injuries to parts of the brain involved in mood stability. Other times, the depression may not be directly related to the damage to the brain. Instead, it may be connected to some of the unpleasant side effects that can come with TBI: changes in cognitive function, inability to work, or physical pain.

  I didn’t know if the mood centers of my brain had been damaged, but I could definitely relate to several of those other possible causes. Plus, there was the heavy-duty pain medication I had been taking that probably contributed to the problem.

  Just reading about TBIs and depression and the millions of people affected by them made me feel like I was in danger of having the sort of panic attack I’d had at the pain-management clinic. It was so distressing to know that the threat of depression was another lifelong issue I would have to deal with. In addition, I felt such empathetic sadness for all the other people who were suffering in the same way I was. So many millions of people were affected by TBI and depression, it seemed like a silent epidemic. If it was so widespread, why didn’t people talk about it the way they did heart disease and cancer?

  To pull myself out of my anxious state, I decided to pay attention to my breathing. I sucked air deep into my lungs and watched my stomach rise and fall with each breath. Even though I was able to avoid the panic attack, my life in general had become a deep blue and stormy ocean, where on good days I lay on the bottom and on bad days I burrowed beneath the sea floor.

  I tried to climb back out of the blues but couldn’t do it. I was willing myself to the store each day at this point, using every fiber of my being to put myself physically there, though my mind was elsewhere.

  It was a particularly bleak day of sadness and side effects when two men pushed two other men in wheelchairs through the front door of Planet Futon. They parked the chairs near the front row of mattresses close to the window and proceeded to look around at the furniture, ignoring their charges. I greeted them all and gave the caregivers the rundown on our inventory. I didn’t like that they were ignoring their patients, so I decided to walk over to them.

  I approached the wheelchairs. One man was indifferent and uttered a small grunt as I said hello, but the other began making a lot of noise. He couldn’t speak but it was clear he wanted to have some sort of interaction. In fact, vocally, he was really animated—and though none of the sounds could be understood as words, I just knew he wanted to have a conversation in some way. His eyes were lit up and he smiled through them, though his mouth was limp.

  “You remind me of Dr. Stephen Hawking,” I said to the man with the smiling eyes. It was not just because he was confined to a wheelchair; he really resembled him. “Do you like him?” He let out a stream of even greater enthusiastic sounds, which seemed to indicate that he did.

  “Hi, I’m Jason.” I continued, “You know, Dr. Hawking may be confined to a chair as well, but he speaks with his eyes, like you do. You can just see the intelligence behind them, like yours. I remember reading that he says his body may be trapped but his mind is free.”

  The man’s eyes got wild with enthusiasm and he moaned loudly. His blue eyes finally stopped darting around and he stared deeply into mine. “I bet you have a lot of time to think,” I said. “I’ve had a lot of time to think in my life too. I hardly left my house for nearly four years after a traumatic brain injury I suffered in a mugging. I would just sit and think and read and watch documentaries. Do you do a lot of thinking? I bet you know so many thi
ngs with all that time to ponder.” His eyes were moving again. Without him speaking, I knew when he meant yes and I knew when he didn’t. This meant yes.

  Then I could hardly believe it but he stared past me at the drawings on the wall behind the register and let out a deep groan.

  “Are you looking at the drawings?”

  Groan.

  “I did them. I see these images in my mind synesthetically for numbers and equations. That one there is pi . . .”

  With that, if the man could have leaped from his chair he would have, because he let out the loudest howl.

  “Oh, you like pi?”

  He howled again.

  I launched into my usual enthusiastic explanation about the irrational number, but this time, I was careful not to sound too patronizing. I didn’t want to talk down to this man. I felt the very cosmos behind those eyes of his.

  When I finished, I told him I wished I could now listen to him teach me what he knew about pi. He let out the saddest little whimper.

  The caregivers came over and told me that both clients suffered from cerebral palsy and that they lived in a facility nearby and were out for their daily walk.

  The men then went back to looking at the furniture and I continued to discuss space-time, the Planck length, and relativity with the patient. The man’s eyes stayed animated and enthusiastic for all of it. They practically sparkled.

  The caregivers came over to take them back to their facility and thanked me for spending time with them. They pushed the men toward the door, and the one I’d had the conversation with kept me in his peripheral vision for as long as possible (he couldn’t move his head). And then they were gone.

  I walked into the storage room in back of the showroom because I didn’t want any customers entering the store to see me crying. I was crying because I felt for the man in the wheelchair. I was crying at the memory of what his eyes looked like when I told him I’d also had a lot of time to think. And I was crying because I realized how lucky I was to be able-bodied. What torture it must be for him some days. What did I have to be upset about?

  Jason, I said to myself, snap out of it and stop complaining about things. Get to work!

  And with that, I pushed the mental and physical pain I was feeling aside, and as soon as all the customers left, I began again drafting what I would say about my experiences when I went to Stockholm.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Scandinavian Spring

  I ENTERED THE LOBBY of the Kungsbron Hotel that chilly Scandinavian April like a dervish. I checked in, then immediately engaged anyone wearing a conference nametag in conversation, talking about my ideas and displaying my binder full of drawings. The place was buzzing—there were lots of people hanging out in clusters of animated discussion.

  Maureen greeted me enthusiastically and immediately introduced me to Stuart Hameroff, the director of the conference, and Nick Day. Nick was a filmmaker specializing in the topic of consciousness and the director of the award-winning documentary Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela. Dr. Hameroff was a professor of anesthesiology and psychology and the director for the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. Together they were collaborating on a full-length feature film called Mindville, about the mysteries of consciousness. They both greeted me warmly. Dr. Hameroff was soon pulled away by one of the dozens of other participants who wanted a word with him, which left me with Nick. I set my drawings out on a coffee table near the front desk and started from the beginning; three hours into my presentation to the patient Nick, I was still going strong. Nick invited me to be part of his documentary on the conference and wanted to do a special interview with me in Consciousness Chronicles, a series of films he’d been making for years that featured the speakers at these conferences. Just like that. Things moved fast from the beginning. You could feel the intellectual curiosity in the air, and there was a sense that people wanted to make the most of their week there. As I sat telling my story and explaining my drawings, I caught a glimpse of Deepak Chopra, and neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick walked by.

  I also could not help but notice the frenetic pacing of a gray-haired man wearing a backward baseball cap nearby in the lobby.

  His curls stuck out under the sides of his hat in Einstein-like poofs—if Einstein had co-opted the look started by professional baseball catchers, that is. You could tell he was deep in thought and should not be bothered at that moment. I learned this was physicist Allan Snyder, director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, Australia. He was also cofounder of Emotiv Systems and winner of the 2001 Marconi Prize for his work in optical physics.

  Dr. Snyder had been doing cutting-edge research on savant syndrome for more than a decade and suggested that savant skills were latent in everyone. Like several other scientists, he believed that the human brain typically filtered out many of the signals it received and focused on the information most necessary for survival. In his view, it was a failure of the brain to filter out that raw data that allowed savants to tap into the extraordinary innate skills within us all. But Dr. Snyder wasn’t interested in the brains of savants alone. In fact, he had actually been trying to artificially induce savantism in normal people.

  To do so, Dr. Snyder invented a creativity cap, which was intended to prod the brain to perform at savantlike levels. The device used a technique called transcranial direct-current stimulation that sent mild electrical jolts into the brain to alter activity within specific regions. Earlier models of the cap relied on magnetic stimulation to produce these results. In his experiments, people actually did better on tests while wearing the device and worse after they took it off. In one of Dr. Snyder’s experiments that was particularly relevant to my case, he and his colleagues used his genius machine on a group of eleven people to see if it could improve their drawing skills. He fitted each nonsavant with the cap and then had him or her draw figures such as a dog, a horse, and a face. He tested each subject before, during, immediately following, and then forty-five minutes after using the device. The results? Immediately after the stimulator was applied, some of the participants displayed a higher level of drawing skills. The boost in ability disappeared forty-five minutes after the device was removed.

  Dr. Snyder later said to Maureen that my case beautifully supported his hypothesis that it was possible to turn savant skills on and off in normal people. When I heard that, I wondered for a second if he knew a way to turn off my exhausting impressions, and I fantasized about asking him to do so, but then I decided I was happier the way I was.

  I was soon joined by Paul Synowiec, the videographer I’d hired to track me at the conference. To save money, he and I would be sharing a room—something that would be very difficult for me, given my phobia of other people’s germs. I could not have asked for a better roommate, though. From the start, Paul was very sensitive to my OCD and checked in frequently to make sure I was doing okay. He put me most at ease by actually swabbing things down with rubbing alcohol; he sterilized everything from the faucet handles to the doorknobs. I couldn’t believe he’d thought of that. He was extra-clean and worked hard to stay on his side of the room so I wouldn’t be nervous.

  After talking with Nick that first night, I realized the other synesthetes had already found one another and were among the most intimate of the groups. Some of them knew one another already from other conferences and from lively online communities dedicated to their abilities. I began to bond with some of them in the hotel lobby and in nearby restaurants and taverns, where we all spent every moment of free time. I hadn’t realized that so many people were actually very comfortable with their synesthesia; people who were born with a version of what I was experiencing seemed much more at home in their skin than I felt sometimes, as this was still very new to me. By getting to know them, I was reminded that synesthesia can take dozens of forms. They were excited when they did presentations on their abilities, but in private, they were more blasé about them than I was. Still, I was not strange to this band of
brothers and sisters who spoke offhandedly among themselves about the photisms they saw—the shapes and the colors that existed out in space or in their minds’ eyes. They welcomed me warmly and immediately. Even though my case was “extraordinary,” it was not so hard to explain things to them because of our shared impressions. Though not all synesthetes are savants—most are believed to be average to above average in intelligence—I found them exceptional. Most of them took very readily to my ideas. Perhaps this was because I’d rendered my concepts in drawings, and synesthetes are known to be gifted in the arts.

  I finally met the distinguished scientist and synesthete Dr. Neil Theise, who had earlier so graciously spent time talking to me about his theories and findings on meditation, synesthesia, consciousness, and the mind. I’d really been looking forward to meeting him in person. He nodded when I explained the shapes I saw out in space around me. Dr. Theise, who was a pioneer in the field of adult stem-cell plasticity, said he saw shapes too; his days and weeks and months extended around him like wheels. He was like a hamster inside a wheel. When he wanted to go to a particular time on a particular day, he simply flicked his spatial wheel and locked in on the exact unit he wanted.

  Dr. Theise and I shared a hero in Einstein. In one of his thought experiments, Einstein had famously imagined riding on a light beam, and he’d had some of his inspirations about special relativity in that vision. Similarly, Dr. Theise said that he’d imagined himself riding a stem cell, and he’d had inspirations about their plasticity in that state.

  During the conference, I met so many amazing people. It was as if I was making up for all those years I’d spent in isolation. There was German synesthete Alexandra Kirschner, a sweet pixie of a singing instructor for a boys’ choir near Stuttgart. She explained to me that she identified child synesthetes in her chorus and taught them to sing by telling them to go to the green, round note or the pink, triangular one instead of saying middle C. She planned to sing as part of her presentation and I was told this would be exceptional, given the perfect acoustics of Aula Magna, Stockholm University’s auditorium, combined with Alexandra’s considerable talent. She was very funny. She gave a running commentary on what was going on by making shadow puppets of her hands and changing her voice for each character; her right hand was a fictional German newscaster she’d created, Paul Nachricht, and her left was his opinionated and tress-obsessed wife, Olga. “Synesthesia Gang going to lunch now,” reported Paul. “It’s snowing. What about my hair?” responded Olga, knowing she’d have to come along, affixed to the end of Alexandra’s wrist as she was.