Dylan Murray
Terrible and traumatic experiences can sometimes have the strangest outcomes and consequences.
While this can be the case with any form of trauma, physical trauma – especially to the brain – can quite literally change the way your brain functions entirely.
Such was the case for Jason Padgett from Alaska, who sees the world through math in both big and small ways. What this means is he views things through geometry and sequences in a way that very few people on Earth are capable of seeing.
Jason explained the origin of his fascination and near-obsession with math, saying that it all originated in 2002 when he got mercilessly attacked outside a bar in Tacoma, Washington.
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Jason was a big partier before his traumatic brain injury. (BBC/Jason Padgett)
Jason recalled the night he was attacked on The Outlook Podcast back in 2018: “I heard–as much as felt–this deep, low-pitched thud as the first guy just ran up behind me and smashed me in the back of the head. I saw this puff of white light just like someone took a picture.
“The next thing I knew I was on my knees and everything was spinning and I didn’t know where I was or how I got there.”
Following this incident, which also featured strikes to Jason’s kidney and the two men stealing his jacket, he went to the hospital for a concussion and a bleeding kidney.
Due to what turned out to be a more severe brain injury than the hospital initially discovered, Jason began suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, better known as OCD.
After spending a long period rarely leaving his home, Jason began to see things in his real life as pixelated, leading to his eventual hyper-fixation with math and geometry.
“The boundaries of everything had these little pixelated edges,” Jason explained, “Since everything was pixelated, everything that moved looked like it was moving relative to a grid.
“The internet really helped a lot… I started reading all about math.”
These visions eventually led Jason to become enamored by fractals and other geometrical phenomena, and with his unique view of mathematics, he became known as a genius. Eventually, Berit Brogaard and other neuroscientists found that Jason was actually experiencing something called synaesthesia, which is when a person’s senses become rewired with one another.
Jason explained his eventual diagnosis: “They found that I had access to parts of the brain that we don’t have conscious access to and also the visual cortex was working in conjunction with the part of the brain that does mathematics."
Since then, Jason has written a book aptly titled Struck By Genius and has developed a very positive outlook on life two decades after his attack.
“You should be walking around in absolute amazement at all times that reality even exists. I’m having this mathematical awakening and all around us is absolute magic or about as close as you can get to magic,” Jason concluded.