Read Online Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel by Jason Padgett, Maureen Ann Seaberg - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jason Padgett, Maureen Ann Seaberg
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many unanswered questions about my brain and consciousness and reality.
While I couldn’t change who I now was, there were steps I could take to better enable me to face the world as my new self. I decided to learn as much as I could about my medical situation and hopefully take small steps toward embracing the diagnosis, whatever it might be. At the same time, I knew I needed to learn all I could about science and math to help me understand the strange new phenomena before my eyes.
I was seeing shapes and grids that I couldn’t understand, as well as bright horizontal lines that would appear from moving objects. At first, I wondered if they were hallucinations. I’d never seen anything so strange and beautiful. But in my core, I felt the visions might be more profound than that. Perhaps they were manifestations of deeper patterns that had always been present in nature but that had been hidden from me up till now. They certainly opened up the world in a new way. It was as though I’d lived all my life in a Magic Eye poster, seeing only the obvious picture; now the hidden image was
all
I could see. I began to see and think about the geometry of everything. The mysteries of the universe were beckoning a man who had never even thought about them before.
I was unaware of this at the time, but in the silent recesses of my skull, my brain was working to heal itself, forming new neuronal connections to compensate for the ones that had been damaged. As my interests began to change and my personality moved from outgoing to bordering on antisocial, my brain was actually recovering in a miraculous way. This updated wetware, as some scholars and theorists refer to the human brain, would go on to make me capable of the biggest intellectual leaps I had ever taken. It would go on to be my bright side. But first, it locked me away from the rest of the living world.
If there was a consolation to my growing isolation, it was that my inner life was now filled with wonder. My vision was overlaid with rays of light, floating interlocking squares, and multiple frames of images of things in motion. It was as if the blows to my head had opened a window onto a geometric realm that had previously been painted shut. Many of the images I saw would turn out to correspond to concepts from physics that I had never studied. Theories of my own about the way things worked, particularly regarding movement and time, began percolating.
Clearly, something about me had drastically changed as a result of the attack. The gregarious old me, in search of the next good time, now found himself steeped in profound and serious thought all day. I’d be deep in contemplation, and the rare visitor I let in would walk up to me and I wouldn’t even see him. The blows had changed me fundamentally. It seemed impossible, but I actually felt smarter, yet more and more isolated.
I could not stop thinking about geometry. I retreated into a pristine world of mathematics and cosmology—it was easy to ponder the heavens from inside my darkened house. My brain wouldn’t turn off.
Everything
became related to geometry. I barely noticed my obsessive counting anymore. My brain felt full, bursting with thoughts and images. It wasn’t just a form of escape, though there was that. I was unable to stop paying attention to the smallest details of the world that I had previously never noticed. I was overwhelmed by the wonder of it all.
Sometimes I pondered the new workings of my brain and tried to figure out where John was simultaneously. My addled gray matter had grown expansive, capable of multitasking—even when the mysteries were as enormous as these. It felt like my brain couldn’t fit inside my skull anymore. It was as though the blows I’d received on that sidewalk opened my head and freed its contents. It was now oceanic in proportion. Life had a before-and-after quality. There were the forms and impressions before the mugging and after it. Before it, everything had
While I couldn’t change who I now was, there were steps I could take to better enable me to face the world as my new self. I decided to learn as much as I could about my medical situation and hopefully take small steps toward embracing the diagnosis, whatever it might be. At the same time, I knew I needed to learn all I could about science and math to help me understand the strange new phenomena before my eyes.
I was seeing shapes and grids that I couldn’t understand, as well as bright horizontal lines that would appear from moving objects. At first, I wondered if they were hallucinations. I’d never seen anything so strange and beautiful. But in my core, I felt the visions might be more profound than that. Perhaps they were manifestations of deeper patterns that had always been present in nature but that had been hidden from me up till now. They certainly opened up the world in a new way. It was as though I’d lived all my life in a Magic Eye poster, seeing only the obvious picture; now the hidden image was
all
I could see. I began to see and think about the geometry of everything. The mysteries of the universe were beckoning a man who had never even thought about them before.
I was unaware of this at the time, but in the silent recesses of my skull, my brain was working to heal itself, forming new neuronal connections to compensate for the ones that had been damaged. As my interests began to change and my personality moved from outgoing to bordering on antisocial, my brain was actually recovering in a miraculous way. This updated wetware, as some scholars and theorists refer to the human brain, would go on to make me capable of the biggest intellectual leaps I had ever taken. It would go on to be my bright side. But first, it locked me away from the rest of the living world.
If there was a consolation to my growing isolation, it was that my inner life was now filled with wonder. My vision was overlaid with rays of light, floating interlocking squares, and multiple frames of images of things in motion. It was as if the blows to my head had opened a window onto a geometric realm that had previously been painted shut. Many of the images I saw would turn out to correspond to concepts from physics that I had never studied. Theories of my own about the way things worked, particularly regarding movement and time, began percolating.
Clearly, something about me had drastically changed as a result of the attack. The gregarious old me, in search of the next good time, now found himself steeped in profound and serious thought all day. I’d be deep in contemplation, and the rare visitor I let in would walk up to me and I wouldn’t even see him. The blows had changed me fundamentally. It seemed impossible, but I actually felt smarter, yet more and more isolated.
I could not stop thinking about geometry. I retreated into a pristine world of mathematics and cosmology—it was easy to ponder the heavens from inside my darkened house. My brain wouldn’t turn off.
Everything
became related to geometry. I barely noticed my obsessive counting anymore. My brain felt full, bursting with thoughts and images. It wasn’t just a form of escape, though there was that. I was unable to stop paying attention to the smallest details of the world that I had previously never noticed. I was overwhelmed by the wonder of it all.
Sometimes I pondered the new workings of my brain and tried to figure out where John was simultaneously. My addled gray matter had grown expansive, capable of multitasking—even when the mysteries were as enormous as these. It felt like my brain couldn’t fit inside my skull anymore. It was as though the blows I’d received on that sidewalk opened my head and freed its contents. It was now oceanic in proportion. Life had a before-and-after quality. There were the forms and impressions before the mugging and after it. Before it, everything had
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