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Narrated by Jeff Cummings, Kate Rudd
Jason PadgettUnabridged — 7 hours, 25 minutes
Narrated by Jeff Cummings, Kate Rudd
Jason PadgettUnabridged — 7 hours, 25 minutes
The remarkable story of an ordinary man who was transformed when a traumatic injury left him with an extraordinary gift
No one sees the world as Jason Padgett 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.
Yet Padgett wasn't born this way. Twelve years ago, he had never made it past pre-algebra. But a violent mugging forever altered the way his brain works, giving him unique gifts. His ability to understand math and physics skyrocketed, and he developed the astonishing ability to draw the complex geometric shapes he saw everywhere. His stunning, mathematically precise artwork illustrates his intuitive understanding of complex mathematics.
The first documented case of acquired savant syndrome with mathematical synesthesia, Padgett is a medical marvel. Struck by Genius recounts how he overcame huge setbacks and embraced his new mind. Along the way he fell in love, found joy in numbers, and spent plenty of time having his head examined. Like Born on a Blue Day and My Stroke of Insight, his singular story reveals the wondrous potential of the human brain.
The narrative travels seamlessly between the personal and the scientific in an engaging, finely rendered tale of a modern-day Phineas Gage—only instead of losing his sense of self, Padgett has gained a vision of the world that is as beautiful as it is challenging.
01/20/2014
Padgett was, at 31, a man who seemed to care more about his biceps than his career—until a brutal mugging completely changed the floundering course of his life. What initially manifested as an altered, more intense experience of visual phenomena developed into dizzying synesthesia and a newfound, savant-level capacity for mathematics. Pi quickly replaced partying in Padgett’s life. But there were physical ramifications, too: Padgett’s muscles withered into a leaner frame and the former gadfly became almost dangerously prone to isolation, the outside world too stimulating for his new senses. Yet Padgett ultimately reemerges into society by attending community college, meeting his eventual wife, pursuing yoga, and continuing to learn about his condition. Psychology Today blogger Seaberg serves as witness and scribe to the events of Padgett’s life, though the clear and personable tone that she and Padgett collectively strike won’t fully sate readers’ curiosity about the book’s miracles. The arc of the story, however, upholds the notion that positive turns come from unexpected places, and the implication that we all possess an inherent type of genius, whatever its truth, is sure to garner at least a modicum of public attention. 17 b&w drawings, 8p. 4-color insert. (May)
"[Struck by Genius] travels seamlessly between the personal and the scientific in an engaging, finely rendered tale of a modern-day Phineas Gage—only instead of losing his sense of self, Padgett has gained a vision of the world that is as beautiful as it is challenging."—New York Times Book Review
"Deeply absorbing . . . It's that contagious enthusiasm, bursting off the page, that makes this tale of a man trying to understand himself so fascinating. A-" —Entertainment Weekly
"How extraordinary it is to contemplate the bizarre gifts that might lie within all of us." —People Magazine, 3 1/2 out of 4 stars
"A remarkable and wonderfully personal medical tale. It reminds us in equal measure about our possible capacities and our impoverished understanding about how to tap into them." —David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
"Jason Padgett’s story is an extraordinary example of the human capacity for adaptation and the immense importance of exploring the individual strengths hidden inside every person’s brain." —Temple Grandin, author of The Autistic Brain and Thinking in Pictures
"Like Dorothy in Oz, Jason sees the man behind the curtain. Except in his case, the wizard is not a trickster but the normal operations of the brain that, in the rest of us, take place outside of consciousness. Struck by Genius is a journey of self-teaching—about what had happened to his brain, why he became a different person overnight, and what the meaning of it was." —Richard E. Cytowic, neurologist and coauthor of Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia
"Acquired savant syndrome is an incredible phenomenon which points toward dormant potential—a little Rain Man perhaps—within us all. Jason Padgett's experience affirms that medical marvel in a demonstrable and irrefutable way. His compelling story calls for even more urgent inquiry into that remarkable, optimistic manifestation which holds great promise for better understanding both the brain and human potential." —Darold A. Treffert, M.D., author of Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired and Sudden Savant
"Modern neuroscience, in spite of its tremendous progress, tends to ignore folk wisdom about the brain's remarkable potential for change and growth. Struck by Genius restores the balance and marshals evidence that there are astonishing abilities in all of us, presently unfathomable, waiting to be unleashed." —V. S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist and author of The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
"A remarkable, heartwarming and unforgettable first-person account of one man's struggle to comprehend his sudden genius in the wake of a traumatic assault. This truly amazing incident opens up a whole new dimension for science to explore." —Berit Brogaard, Professor of Philosophy and Neurodynamics, University of Missouri, St. Louis"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
"Padgett’s heartfelt story of learning to cope with his new faculties, the onset of OCD that accompanied them, the intensive clinical testing and research that continue today, and how his experience changed his life, will appeal to fans of the films Rain Man and A Beautiful Mind, as well as the works of Oliver Sacks." —Library Journal
"Beautiful, inspiring and intimate . . . An exquisite insider’s look into the mysteries of consciousness." —Kirkus Reviews, *starred* reviewThis first-person account of the life and trials of the man with the first documented case of acquired savant syndrome and mathematical synesthesia will change the way you think about consciousness. Jason Padgett was a normal—if rather shallow—young man until a traumatic brain injury transformed the way he understood the world and the way he interacted with it. Jeff Cummings rises to the extraordinary challenge of presenting a first-person account of a transformation of consciousness. He reads Padgett’s memoir with an open, upbeat authenticity. He helps the listener accept and, eventually, like and admire a man whose perception of the world is so different from the majority of people's. Cummings’s voice is strong, and his pacing is perfect. F.C. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
2014-03-29
When Padgett suffered a traumatic brain injury after a violent mugging, his sense of perception was profoundly altered. Overnight, his life as a fun-loving salesman changed into one dominated by unprompted geometric visualizations and the unexpected insights of newfound mathematical brilliance. The effect of the author's injury was as complex as it was sudden. In addition to seeing crystalline and fractal patterns as part of the properties of objects and spaces around him, he developed a paralyzing fear of being among people and germs. Further debilitated by a series of personal losses, Padgett spent years in isolation, spending all his time investigating the concepts that suddenly held his mind hostage: math and science but also medical theories that might explain his neurological transformation. Based on his research, he suspected he had developed a form of synesthesia—a condition in which sensations are perceived in unusual ways, such as seeing letters or numbers as inseparable from specific colors—as a result of his injury. He was right. Padgett was officially diagnosed as having acquired savant syndrome and mathematical synesthesia, making him the only person with this diagnosis in the world. Throughout his transformation and recovery, the author compulsively drew pictures of the shapes that materialized and refracted before his eyes. These drawings, stunning in their complexity and also important to the author as a therapeutic method, have since been recognized internationally. Also important is that advanced technologies have provided images of his brain in unprecedented detail, resulting in a broader understanding of synesthesia as it affects the brain's chemistry. To put his remarkable story in writing, he partnered with Seaberg, a fellow synesthete who writes about synesthesia for Psychology Today. The result is a beautiful, inspiring and intimate account of Padgett's struggles and breakthroughs. An exquisite insider's look into the mysteries of consciousness.< BR>★
| BN ID: | 2940169530568 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Brilliance Audio |
| Publication date: | 04/22/2014 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
CHAPTER 1
Jason 2.0
If you could see the world through my eyes, you would know how perfect it is, how much order runs through it, and how much structure is hidden in its tiniest parts. We're so often victims of things — I see the violence too, the disease, the poverty stretching far and wide — but the universe itself and everything we can touch and all that we are is made of the most beautiful geometric patterns imaginable. I know because they're right in front of me. Because of a traumatic brain injury, the result of a brutal physical attack, I've been able to see these patterns for over a decade. This change in my perception was really a change in my brain function, the result of the injury and the extraordinary and mostly positive way my brain healed. All of a sudden, the patterns were just ... there, and I realize now that my injury was a rare gift. I'm lucky to have survived, but for me, the real miracle — what really saved me — was being introduced to and almost overwhelmed by the mathematical grace of the universe.
There's a park in my town of Tacoma, Washington, that I like to walk through in the mornings before work. I see the trees that line its path as anyone would, the branches and the bark, but I see a geometrical blueprint laid on top of them too. I see triangular patterns emerging from the leaves, reminding me of the Pythagorean theorem, as if it's unfolding in the air, proving to me over and over again what the ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras deduced thousands of years ago: the sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle (a triangle in which one angle is a right angle, or 90 degrees) equals the square of its hypotenuse. I don't need a calculator to know that the simple formula most of us learned in school — a2 + b2 = c2 — is true; I can see it instantly in the trees all around me. To me, a tree is more than its geometry, but geometry is also far more than most people realize. I think it's everything.
I remember reading that Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer, mathematician, and physicist (and one of my heroes), said that we cannot understand the universe until we have learned its language. He said, "It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it."
This rings true for me. I see this hidden language of the world before my eyes.
Doctors tell me that nothing in my brain was newly created or added when I was injured. Rather, innate but dormant skills were released. This theory comes from psychiatrist Darold Treffert, who is considered the world's leading authority on savants and acquired savants. He treated the late Kim Peek (the inspiration for the savant character in the movie Rain Man), a megasavant who memorized twelve thousand books, including the Bible and the Book of Mormon, but who had so many physical challenges that he had to rely on his father for his most basic needs. When I met with Dr. Treffert in his hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, he told me that these innate skills are, in his words, "factory-installed software" or "genetic" memory. After interviewing me in his office and in his home, he declared that my acquired synesthesia and savant syndrome was self-evident, and he also suggested that all of us have extraordinary skills just beneath the surface, much as birds innately know how to fly in a V-formation and fish know how to swim in a school. Why the brain suppresses these remarkable abilities is still a mystery, but sometimes, when the brain is diseased or damaged, it relents and unleashes the inner genius. This isn't just my story. It's the story of the potential secreted away in all of us.
The first thing I do every morning is make my way to the bathroom, turn on the faucet, and let the sink fill up. I watch the water flow and wonder why it doesn't sound like the strumming of tightly wound strings. The structure of flowing water vibrates in a specific geometric form and frequency to me, and if it were to freeze midstream, I'd see a web, but one made up of tiny crystals rather than spider's silk. If I could hear it after it froze, it would sound like tinkling glass shards falling into the basin. I like to start my days with water. It may slip through my fingers, but it is a constant comfort.
I look at myself in the mirror and make sure my hair's not getting too long. I like it cropped close now. I grab my toothbrush and count how many times I run it through the water while brushing my teeth. It has to be exactly sixteen times. I don't know why I chose that number, but it's fixed in my mind like my street address or my zip code. I try not to worry about it too much and stare back at the intriguing water webs, working to memorize all of the angles so that I can draw a picture of the image later. I'll probably spend hours with a pencil and ruler later on, capturing on paper every inch of the razor-sharp symmetry.
Next, I walk into the living room and throw back the drapes. If it's a clear day, I'm in for a real show. The sun comes shining through the leaves of the trees like a million little lights, as if the leaves are blades and they cut the sun up into a million diamonds. Then the rays fan out between the leaves, falling over them like an illuminated net. Watching this, I always think of the famous double-slit experiment, in which light behaves like a particle and a wave at the same time. My friends tell me that to them, it's just the sun shining through the trees. I can barely remember a time when I saw the world the way most everyone else does.
On an overcast or stormy day, I pay more attention to the branches swaying in the wind. The movements are choppy and discrete, like a series of frames of a film, with black lines separating each image. At first, I got dizzy when this happened, and I had to grab the back of a chair or lean against a wall. Now I'm used to it, though I still have moments of vertigo.
Next I move on to the kitchen and put on some coffee. It's one of my routines, but it thrills me every single time I watch the cream being stirred into the brew. That perfect spiral is an important shape to me. It's a fractal — a repetitive geometric form found everywhere in nature, from the shell of a nautilus up to the Milky Way galaxy. Suddenly it's not just my morning cup of joe — awesome as the coffee in the Pacific Northwest is — it's geometry speaking to me again. And I never get tired of it.
I sit down at the kitchen table and add to whatever sketch I'm working on; lately, I've been drawing the coffee-and-cream spiral. I'm a real perfectionist and I can stay in my seat for hours and draw; usually, I do this until I have to leave for work. When it's finally time to go, I put on my "uniform"— a button-down shirt and jeans. I like to look professional but I'm not really one to wear a suit and I often have to lift heavy things or repair stuff at work. I make sure I close the door behind me carefully. I always have to check and double-check and triple-check the locks. Then I can go.
I used to drive my wife, Elena, to school in the morning. I did it partly because I like spending as much time as possible with her, but it was also a matter of her safety. Until very recently, we lived in a not-so-friendly part of Tacoma called Hilltop. Our house was next door to a soup kitchen, and while I was sympathetic to its patrons, a few of the folks were tough characters. Sometimes it was like running a gauntlet in the alley beside our house just to get to our car. I could handle it, but if anyone ever hurt Elena, I don't know what I'd do. Some of the homeless people hung out on our porch waiting for the soup kitchen to open. One time I tripped over a man sleeping at the foot of our front door. He just moaned and didn't move an inch.
Owing to the nearby jail, our street was filled with storefront offices that housed bail bondsmen and defense lawyers, and the foot traffic was made up of people who required their services. Many of them were gang members. A lot of the crimes they were accused of stemmed from the crack and methamphetamine epidemics in Washington State. During the twelve years I lived there, I came to recognize a lot of the characters; they showed up again and again — repeat offenders, I guess. Even the name of the local sandwich place was inspired by the atmosphere: the 911 Deli. Lunch emergencies were the least of my neighborhood's problems.
But the location was convenient for me and Elena because we both attended nearby colleges. Elena was studying business, and I'd returned to school to learn all I could about math and physics. I'd dropped out years before my injury due to poor grades and the fact that school just didn't interest me. I made it through only half of my sophomore year of college. I had to drop out again a few years ago to take care of my health and the family business, but I recently re-enrolled. My instructors say I have an incredible and inexplicable grasp of theory, considering that I've never studied these subjects formally before, but I still need to learn the basics. Although it's easy for me to understand the mathematical nature of the universe now, I don't have the background to express it verbally. But I'm really happy to be in school. For the first time in my life, I'm taking my education seriously.
During my morning drives, which now start at Browns Point, I sing along to the radio and do my best to concentrate on the traffic, but there's a lot competing for my attention. I'm constantly watching the light play off cars, including the hood of my own, and it seems to signal to me something about the relative speeds of vehicles on the road. The length of the light between the cars I see in stop-action frames is a short filament; when things move faster, this light stream is longer. I found out in school that this image I see could be a textbook description of accepted theories on derivatives of position and velocity that lead to acceleration in physics. I find it's more reliable to react to these visuals than to people's brake lights. The shape of the sky itself as I look out my windshield can be a distraction too. Its half-dome curvature reminds me of pi, the irrational number that represents the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. Most of us have seen pi written as 3.14 or 3.14159, but the digits actually never end. Pi goes on into infinity and never repeats, which is why it's called an irrational number and also why it's so fascinating to me. I draw pi constantly as a circle subdivided by triangles, and I've gotten so that I can fit 720 triangles into the circle. I'd put more in there but that's the highest number I can produce before the width of the pencil lead causes the lines to run together.
When I drive past the city's harbor — Commencement Bay — I'm always on the lookout for rainbows. The stormy conditions of Washington State turn the sky over this body of water — full of frolicking seals and the occasional orca — into a real rainbow factory in spite of the industrial smokestacks spewing smog into the air overhead. Each time I see one I'm reminded of their geometry. To me, they are a reflection of pi. I'm apt to pull over the car and text people when I see an exceptional one: Double bow! Three o'clock!
My first stop after passing the harbor is often the office of the doctor or the physical therapist to deal with chronic pain from old injuries. Both offices tend to be busy, and I usually have to wait, but I have no problem keeping myself occupied. Downtime gives me the opportunity to think.
While other patients reach for the dog-eared magazines, I imagine myself shrinking down to a microscopic level, no larger than a bacterium. My perspective shifts until I can no longer see the ceiling above me, and the end table in the corner of the room sprawls out like a giant, unexplored plain. I begin taking microscopic steps, and I come upon a spot on the table where a fellow patient's filling out her paperwork, pressing her ballpoint pen into the medical form's surface. After she finishes and moves the paper aside, I find myself lost in the huge crater: the indent in the wood formed when she dotted an i. Like an explorer, I hike its entirety, traversing the valley in half an hour or so and looking at the grains of the wood as if I were in the middle of a gargantuan forest. I climb to the surface and look across the expanse of the indents left from the other letters and numbers she wrote. They spread out before me like the mysterious Nazca lines of Peru and I forget for a moment how they were made and puzzle over them. When the receptionist calls my name, I'm pulled out of the rabbit hole, and I walk into the office thinking that this is my particular theory of relativity. The table looks smooth from a human perspective, but we'd need only to shrink down to a smaller perspective to experience the textures I imagined. Everything is relative to your place in the world. Speaking of which, I'm also a real champ at waiting in line at the bank. I think it's a stroke of luck not to know boredom anymore.
Despite my very rich inner life, like anyone, I have to come back down to earth to deal with the day-to-day business of survival. I make my living at a place called Planet Futon. Seriously. When I get to work, there are usually a dozen fires to put out right away that snap me out of my reverie and into the here and now. It's a family business. My dad owns the furniture factory in Illinois that supplies our three stores in the Tacoma area, and I have managed them for him on and off since 2001, spending most of my time at the flagship store. It's important to have a member of the family in charge, otherwise people might rob you blind. I know because I took a little time off recently, and it wasn't long before one of the workers was offering customers discounts for using cash, delivering the furniture himself, and then keeping the money. Also, if a piece of furniture is missing a part, the workers tend to poach that part off the brand-new furniture instead of just ordering it, which creates a cascade of problems. The stores support not only my household but also my dad's. Most of the responsibility of making them profitable falls on my shoulders. As grateful as I am for the job, it puts a tremendous amount of pressure on me, and I don't handle stress as well as I used to. In the old days, I met it head-on, but now I avoid any and all confrontations. This new personality trait is something my doctors consider a tradeoff, a drawback that comes with my new abilities.
As hard as it is to manage employees and keep the fleet of delivery trucks humming, I enjoy my interactions with our customers. Some salespeople talk to shoppers about the weather or last night's game to break the ice, and that's fine. I used to do the same thing. But now I talk to them about geometry and physics. You'd be surprised how positively people respond — even people who didn't think they cared a whit about either topic. The trick is to make it relevant. It's as easy as describing the mechanism of the fulcrum that opens a futon; I do that, and we're off.
I'm forty-three as of this writing. This makes me really happy because 43 is a prime number, divisible by only itself and 1. The number 43 lives at a specific point in a sphere in my mind's eye, as do all the other primes. I've drawn images of this sphere, which is consistent for me whenever I think of primes and the patterns among them. I feel such a reverence for these numbers that I recite them like a mantra when I need good luck or when I need to keep bad luck away. It's as if the primes are so rare and so special that they're imbued with an extraordinary power, and they act like sentinels in my mind. When I'm napping on the sofa, my daughter, Megan, sometimes wakes me up because I'm reciting prime numbers in my sleep.
But primes aren't the only numbers I associate with shapes. Simply dialing a friend's phone number can send up a plume of images. Numbers appear to me as a series of cubes. They are linear — three cubes across for the number 3, four across for 4 — unless the numbers are part of an equation or they're being plotted on a graph, in which case the cubes move around to reflect what's happening to the numbers. An equation can result in a huge, prismatic net right before my eyes. The shapes are always consistent with the specific stimulus. Numbers are an obsession, and I'm incapable of turning the fixation off. I can't climb stairs without counting them, and I can't eat without counting how many times I've chewed each bite. I never chew gum for this reason. With every number I count off, the fresh, simple prime numbers and all the other never-ending numbers spiral into their own shapes.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Struck by Genius"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Jason Padgett and Maureen Ann Seaberg.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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