You Won’t Believe What, A Brutal Beating Did To This Man
As far as brutal beatings go, the results are never pretty. The damage is usually catastrophic. However, when Jason Padgett, an ordinary furniture salesman in Tacoma, Washington, US, was gravely assaulted by two men, instead of succumbing to his injuries, the man transformed into a genius.
Way back in 2002, Jason Padgett was inhumanely beaten up by two assailants. He was repeatedly hit mercilessly and the duo even attacked his head. Repeated blows and kicks sent Jason Padgett in unconsciousness. Jason suffered from severe concussion and a badly damaged kidney. When Jason started to recover, he started to experience post-traumatic stress disorder, a psychological condition usually seen in war veterans.
However, that isn’t what is interesting. As his recovery progressed, Jason realized that he was seeing the world differently – everything looked like it was made up of mathematically explainable geometrical shapes. He saw a circle as made up of overlapping triangles. He could instantaneously draw complex geometric shapes. He visualized shapes when presented with mathematical equations, reported Discovery News.
Jason started to exhibit symptoms of a condition known as Synesthesia. Though not exceedingly rare, Synesthesia occurs when two senses get mixed up. When the impulses or signals of two distinct senses are triggered simultaneously, the person may see a particular color when exposed to a particular smell, and so on. Padgett is one of a rare set of individuals with acquired savant syndrome, in which a normal person develops prodigious abilities after a severe injury or disease. Other people have developed remarkable musical or artistic abilities, but few people have acquired mathematical faculties like Padgett’s, reported livescience.
Jason, who is now an expert at ‘Number Theory’, has been actively studied by medical experts and they believe they have deciphered exactly what ‘clicked’. They say that an area behind the crown of the head, known as the Parietal Cortex, appears to have become more active. This region is known to combine information from different senses.
Padgett’s world is bursting with mathematical patterns. He is one of a few people in the world who can draw approximations of fractals, the repeating geometric patterns that are building blocks of everything in the known universe, by hand. Tree leaves outside his window are evidence of Pythagoras’ theorem. The arc that light makes when it bounces off his car proves the power of pi.
Being beaten is never a event that is looked forward to. But the author of ‘Struck By Genius’, might have a different view point.
[Image Credit | livescience]
