Struck by Genius

How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel

Jason Padgett, Maureen Seaberg

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780544045606
• eBook ISBN: 9780544045644
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Medicine Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

From head trauma to scientific wonder—a "deeply absorbing . . . fascinating" true story of acquired savant syndrome ( Entertainment Weekly).
Twelve years ago, Jason Padgett had never made it past pre-algebra. But a violent mugging forever altered the way his brain worked. It turned an ordinary math-averse student into an extraordinary young man with a unique gift to see the world as no one else does: water pours from the faucet in crystalline patterns, numbers call to mind distinct geometric shapes, and intricate fractal patterns emerge from the movement of tree branches, revealing the intrinsic mathematical designs hidden in the objects around us.
 
As his ability to understand physics skyrocketed, the "accidental genius" developed the astonishing ability to draw the complex geometric shapes he saw everywhere. Overcoming huge setbacks and embracing his new mind, Padgett "gained a vision of the world that is as beautiful as it is challenging." Along the way he fell in love, found joy in numbers, and spent plenty of time having his head examined ( The New York Times Book Review).
 
Illustrated with Jason's stunning, mathematically precise artwork, his singular story reveals the wondrous potential of the human brain, and "an incredible phenomenon which points toward dormant potential—a little Rain Man perhaps—within us all" (Darold A. Treffert, MD, author of Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired, and Sudden Savant).
 
"A tale worthy of Ripley's Believe It or Not! . . . This memoir sends a hopeful message to families touched by brain injury, autism, or neurological damage from strokes." — Booklist
 
"How extraordinary it is to contemplate the bizarre gifts that might lie within all of us." — People

Chapter Two

Jason 1.0

THERE WAS ONCE a time when, apart from tallying my bar tab or cashing my paycheck or counting repetitions when I did curls at the gym, I was blissfully unaware of mathematics. In fact, I was more than unaware; I was math-averse. In school, I was like so many other students: the only questions I had for my math teachers were “When am I going to use that?” and “How does this apply to anything in the real world?” I never made it past pre-algebra, much less developed any theories about the geometric underpinnings of the universe.

Back then, nothing I was taught in school seemed relevant. I wasn’t motivated and I got terrible grades. I didn’t have much of an attention span. I liked to party. I was an adrenaline junkie, always in search of the next fix. Eventually I dropped out of college.

Life was meant to be enjoyed, after all, and there was nothing fun about math or science or academic pursuits of any kind—all of which required sitting still. I was out every night of the week after school or after work. Now, that was fun. My main concerns were where I’d be partying that night, which girls I’d be meeting, and what drinks I’d be drinking. When I lived in Alaska, which I did on and off through my teens and early twenties, that meant meeting Justin, John, Rick, and Alicia at Chilkoot Charlie’s (“Where we cheat the other guy and pass the savings on to you!”); Hot Rods, with its lineup of muscle cars on display; or Asia Gardens, for a little (or a lot of) karaoke. When I was in Tacoma, my entourage was Angela, Tina, and Clark, and we’d end up at either Café Arizona or Shogun’s after a game of ultimate Frisbee. I was never alone.

My frequent trips to the gym left my biceps bulging; I wore cutoff T-shirts to better display my muscles. My hair was long and heavy with styling products. My favorite outfit to go out in was tight jeans, no shirt, and a leather vest. I wince now when I think of this getup, sort of what a Chippendales dancer would wear. I was just looking for the next good time, sometimes in Alaska and sometimes in Washington State, as I shuttled back and forth between divorced parents.

When I was a teenager I drew up a bucket list—before there were bucket lists—of all the things I wanted to do before I died. When I look back at it now, it actually looks like a list of ways to die. And I worked my way through it. Cliff jumping while skiing? Check, a bunch of times. Bungee jumping? At least thirty times, once in Mexico at a shady place that was later shut down for safety violations. Skydiving? Nineteen times. Scuba diving with sharks? Check, in the Bahamas. I broke my hand twice, broke my leg, broke my collarbone, and broke my heel, all for the sake of feeling the rush.

Even before that, I took up martial arts—at the age of twelve—and I earned a brown belt in karate. I loved being physical as much as I loved the thrill I got from the fear of getting hurt. I was prone to boredom; I couldn’t even sit still for Saturday-morning cartoons. I avoided feeling bored by keeping myself in constant motion. I was adventurous from the start, and my first memory of experiencing the possibility of danger came from a trip our family went on when I was three years old.

We’d stopped at a little roadside restaurant for something to eat. There were picnic tables out back with a view of Campbell Creek, which at that point was swollen to river proportions from the Alaska spring thaw. I spotted a beach ball floating by, and my parents turned away for just a moment. I stepped into the rushing tributary.

I honestly thought I could walk on water. I knew about puddles, which I’d been able to splash through without harm, so I thought I would just step out and grab the ball. It was a complete shock when I sank into the water and was carried away in the rapids. I couldn’t have been more surprised if my foot had gone through asphalt.

My brother was right behind me. With no regard for his own safety, five-year-old John went in after me, and he was also swept away.

I saw my brother by my side in the swirling water as the creek ran into a tunnel under a roadway. Then my head dipped under, and there was darkness. Then daylight—breathe—and the sight of long flights of stairs leading up to waterfront homes. River, darkness. Then daylight—breathe—and a woman standing on one of those stairways with an armload of groceries. River, darkness. Then daylight—breathe—and the sight of all those groceries flying in the air and the woman running toward us. River, darkness. Then daylight—breathe—warm bathwater in the lady’s home, police officers, worried parents, and John at my side.

My mother and father divorced when I was nine years old. Mom moved with my older brother and me to the pit-stop town of Cantwell, Alaska. She worked as a medevac paramedic for oil and logging companies in the Alaska wilderness, and the town of Cantwell was pretty much just a twelve-room motel, a restaurant, and a gas station. Kids weren’t allowed at the motel—not that there were any other kids there—so she rented a small cabin around a bend in the road. We spent our days without running water or electricity. John and I ate our meals together at the restaurant, and we worked in tandem to haul water in a ten-gallon bucket, too heavy for sixty-pound me alone. We played adventurers by gaslight in the cabin and explored the woods, removing surveyors’ wooden posts and crafting swords out of them. I knew what it meant to have very little.

I may have been a heat-seeking missile for risk and adventure throughout childhood and young adulthood, but I found myself strongly drawn to people unlike myself. From the start I had a soft spot for shy, quiet people—never more so than when I met a fellow student I’ll call Mike after I moved to Washington to be with my dad, when I was ten. Mike was extremely introverted, wore thick Coke-bottle-lens glasses, and was as messy as Pig-Pen in the Peanuts comic strip. You just knew he had a story to tell. I was cordial to him even though he was roundly shunned by everyone else, but I didn’t really befriend him until my sophomore year of high school, when I was sixteen.

One afternoon I saw him reaching into the cafeteria trash cans when he thought no one was looking, pulling out orange peels and trying to eat the fruit still stuck to them. I couldn’t help but stare, and then I noticed the duct tape covering the holes in his jeans. Didn’t he have enough money for a patch or a needle and thread? I wondered. Compared to my time in the woods with my mom, I was spoiled with my dad as a teen. My father’s furniture business was flourishing, and we lived a comfortable life—we had a grand total of ten cars in the garage and driveway—and I felt pangs of guilt after noticing Mike’s situation. Seeing him forage for his lunch reminded me of a time in my life when I barely had the basics myself.

Later that afternoon I asked Mike if he’d like to hang out with me and my best friend at the time, Jeff. He looked completely surprised but said yes, and pretty soon the three of us were thick as thieves.

“Stand up straight, Mike,” Jeff would advise him when we were out and about. “Look people in the eye. It’s okay.” Jeff and I were part of the popular crowd so we even managed to fix him up with a couple of girls.

One day I drove Mike home after we’d all been hanging out. As soon as we entered his house, his mother yelled, “Mike, get out on that bus!” I was sure she didn’t mean the derelict yellow school bus I’d noticed in the front yard, but she did. Mike wasn’t allowed in the house. His family gave him scraps from the table like a dog. He was embarrassed that I’d seen his home life, and with his head hung low, he explained to me that it was still better than when his biological father was living there.

At that moment I decided to bring Mike home with me. He reminded me of Oliver Twist, a Dickens character I’d played in a local production of Oliver! only a few years earlier, when I strongly resembled the actor who played the British orphan in the movie. That day, after hearing Mike’s story, my father set up a cot for him in my bedroom, and we washed his clothes and gave him a good meal.

With Mike’s new home all ready, I took him back to his house and encouraged him to not only pick up his few possessions but also give his mother and stepfather a piece of his mind. He walked up to his stepfather and screamed “Fuck you!” right into his face. The man went into another room and returned with a pistol. We ran from the house and took off like a shot in my little Datsun (actually the slowest car in the Padgett fleet back then). From that point on, Mike was the third brother in the Padgett household.

On his birthday, we blindfolded him, covered his ears, put him in the car, and took him on a shopping trip. We bought him shoes and all sorts of clothes and had everything gift-wrapped. We went on a total spree with him, which finally ended when we walked him, still blindfolded and earmuffed, into Chuck E. Cheese’s. We took off the earmuffs and the blindfold, and he stared at the presents set out on the table for a second, then burst into tears. Jeff and I were trying not to cry ourselves when he told us it was the only birthday of his anyone had ever celebrated.

After we graduated from high school, we lost touch; I was uprooted time and again as my parents went through a series of divorces and remarriages.

Many people who have been shuttled around often in life have trouble making friends. That was never the case with me—my many friends ran the gamut from the shy ones like Mike to those who shared my spirit of adventure. Though I developed a lifelong fear of swimming after the near-drowning incident in Campbell Creek, it didn’t stop me from becoming a member of the polar-bear club—a group of people across the nation who are dedicated to braving cold bodies of water—and jumping into the Arctic Ocean years later, when I was working on a northern oil field more than a day’s drive from Anchorage. I loved being a “polar bear,” and I even saw some of the actual white giants a couple of times during my tenure in the oil fields. Sometimes they looked almost approachable, covering their eyes with their paws or rubbing their noses like in a cartoon. I felt equally at home with people and with nature. I guess you could say I was rugged. I loved the wildness of Alaska and I cultivated a wild streak in myself too.

I remember vividly how the caribou herd on that northern Alaska slope behaved. They reminded me of myself: strong and free and comfortable on the open plain. The large deerlike creatures, thousands of them, were always flicking their ears, whipping their tails, and suddenly bucking or diving into a nearby creek to stave off a swarm of mosquitoes dropping in from above the tundra.

I was twenty years old that first season in the oil fields. I pulled mosquito netting down over my hardhat and taped it to my collar—it looked like a beekeeper’s helmet—to avoid the swarm. I’d purchased the netting because my mother, whose new husband had gotten me the job, had warned me that the mosquitoes up north could bite through even blue jeans. It was a rough job, picking up trash in the oil fields on the outskirts of Barrow, near Prudhoe Bay. I was 857 miles north of my hometown of Anchorage and one of only fifty young people chosen out of thousands of applicants for the summer work. And I was lucky to be earning the eleven hundred dollars a week, but the days were long. I had to pull twelve-hour shifts every day for two weeks, then I got two weeks off. The fact that the sun never set made it only a little bit easier.

Swiney, my boss and the biggest roustabout on my crew, considered me a chip off the old hog. He called me Pork Chop, and the nickname stuck. Everyone had a nickname on the oil fields; the two young women who rounded out our group were Cookie Monster and Demon.

“Hey, Pork Chop,” Swiney said one day. “Watch this.”

Cookie Monster and Demon were out collecting trash about five hundred feet from the Ford pickup truck that was their mobile command center for a dozen hours a day. We all drove trucks specially fitted with two gas tanks, and we had to monitor the fuel levels constantly; the last thing you wanted was to run out of gas somewhere out in the cold, miles from the camp. You had to leave the engine running at all times because if you turned the truck off in the bad weather, it might not start up again. The young women wore beekeepers’ helmets too (once they saw mine, they each wanted one, and they paid me ten times more than it cost me to purchase the materials for them), but they had an aversion to carrying the nine-pound air-monitoring devices that would alert them to the presence of hydrogen sulfide gas—known as H₂S around those parts—a lethal byproduct of the drilling that sometimes seeped to the surface of the fields. Swiney, the team leader, had been on their cases about it, but they said it weighed them down too much while they worked. They’d been told repeatedly that at a certain threshold of parts per million, H₂S can shut down human hearts and lungs. Even that information didn’t convince them to lug around the monitors.

So that day, Swiney took his own air-monitoring device, put it down by his butt, and farted loudly into the equipment, which immediately set off the machine’s warning signals and sent the huge caribou herd galloping. The monitor’s alarm and the thundering hooves of thousands of animals were the only sounds in that barren, apocalyptic landscape of scrub and mud.

“H-two-S! H-two-S!” he screamed. The girls dropped the wooden spears that gave us our job description—stick-pickers—and ran for their lives, bumping into each other and repeatedly falling in the mud as they plowed toward the truck to get their gas masks. Swiney and I ran for cover, doubling over with laughter.

Later, a truck full of oil workers came speeding toward our crew. By now, we were used to the crass and randy men who made up the village of five thousand employees. They hung out the window of the truck and whistled and made rude gestures at the women and then threw an open bag of garbage at our feet.

“Job security!” screamed one of the men as they sped away. The oil workers faced serious danger every day, and they resented the fact that we did much safer work but earned nearly as much as they did, and all because each of us had a dad or an uncle or a family friend who was an industry executive and who threw a little nepotism our way. Stick-pickers like us seldom reported the abuse; we knew life would be even worse in that frontier town if we did. We simply leaned over, picked up the trash, and got back to work.

I had a girlfriend named Melissa at the time; she worked on a different crew, and we broke camp rules and trysted together in our off-hours in the barracks where we lived for the season. We hung thick blankets over the windows to block out the midnight sun. Melissa was very pretty and very smart, but we were young and the last thing I wanted was to get too serious.

One day it was particularly cold out on the tundra and I knew Melissa’s parka wouldn’t be warm enough for her shift, so I lent her my warmest, thickest coat. Both of our crews were sent to clean the field around the landing strip, where a cargo plane had just set down. My group was alongside the plane, parallel to it; Melissa, sitting in her crew’s pickup truck, was directly behind the jet. Out of the blue, only minutes after the plane’s engine had shut down, it started back up. I turned immediately to Melissa’s crew and started jumping and waving for them to get out of the way, but it was too late. I saw the young Eskimo man she worked with go hurtling through the air in the jet wash. I began to run toward them, avoiding the exhaust stream.

When I got to the truck, Melissa was inside and all the windows on the vehicle were blown out. The jacket I’d lent her was pierced everywhere by shards of glass, but the lining was so thick that the glass hadn’t cut all the way through, and she’d been wearing her helmet the whole time. I was so relieved she was all right, and I realized how much I really did care for her. Her coworker had only minor injuries, but he could easily have been killed. It was always scary in the oil fields, and always dangerous, but although I hate to admit it, it was also thrilling, all of it.

Somehow we all managed to survive that work assignment and we made it back home to civilization.

When I was in Anchorage, my friend Rick Cordova was my go-to pal for good times. Tall, dark, and handsome, he was popular with the ladies and was always upsetting one jealous boyfriend or another. Sometimes it was just because he showed up to a bar looking really good. He hadn’t done anything at all—yet. Once we were walking in the mall and some guy with a beef started to run toward him, his arm pulled back to deliver a punch. I yelled, “Duck!” Rick hit the deck, and the guy missed. We were a good team.

When I married Melissa, Rick traveled all the way to our wedding in Montana. Despite Melissa and I not wanting to get too serious, she’d gotten pregnant back in Alaska. One day, right after we found out, I ran into her uncle. He was an oil executive who worked up on the slope. “I know you’ll do the right thing,” he said sternly. So I did. I proposed.

I’d been incredibly nervous and uncertain about marriage and family at first, but a couple of months before the baby was due, I started to become excited—I wanted to be a father. This made it especially devastating when Jason Padgett Jr. was born premature and lived only a couple of days. He died in my arms as I rocked him back and forth in a chair in a corner of the hospital room. Melissa and I just stood there like zombies during the funeral. He was the only thing that had kept us together, but neither of us realized how much we had wanted him until tragedy struck. Melissa and I clung to each other for another year, then we divorced. I think of her often and of the little boy who bore my name.

If Jason Jr. had lived, I might have settled down and become a real family man. Who knows? Fate had dealt me a different hand and I went right on back to my partying ways. It was just who I was. That’s not to say I never had a quiet moment of introspection or that I was totally shallow in those years. There were times in my early life when I took responsibility for myself, and for others too. Still, the majority of my younger years are a blur. I was spinning like a top in pursuit of stimulation. I had to find excitement outside my own mind, as I had very little inner life, and the inner life I did have wasn’t anything I wanted to dwell on. As I mentioned, my parents each went through a string of divorces and remarriages, and my brother, John, became increasingly troubled and estranged from the rest of us as he grew older.

Despite my outward happy-go-lucky, party-guy persona, there was an undercurrent of seediness in the club life I lived, from the drama of the promiscuity to the violence of the alcohol-fueled fights. Behavior that was cute or at least expected when I was in my twenties—boys will be boys, after all—became a little sad when I was in my thirties, as I kept to the same habits while most everyone else was settling down.

By that point I’d had another child, a beautiful daughter named Megan, with one of my girlfriends, Michelle. I was overjoyed when she was born healthy, and I loved her completely, but marrying her mother wasn’t something that appealed to me, and it didn’t appeal to Michelle either. For a while, we rented on the same floor in the same apartment building so that Megan could just run between our homes and have us both near. But having a daughter didn’t change my partying ways. As long as I kept moving, kept drinking, kept hooking up and laughing...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• A Note from Maureen
• Jason 2.0
• Jason 1.0
• Subtraction
• Gray Matter
• Compounded Losses
• New Gifts
• The Edge of a Circle
• Inflection Point
• Joe College
• The Hermit and the Hermitage
• The Man from Planet Futon
• Contact
• Photos
• Savant and Yogi?
• It’s All Relative
• Scandinavian Spring
• Traveling Without Moving
• Pilgrimage to Wisconsin
• No Regrets
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors
• Connect with HMH
• Footnotes