Portuguese 
Spanish 
6 min of reading 
0 comments 
In 2002, Padgett was a young party-goer in Washington when two men attacked him outside a karaoke bar. The blow left him with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but also made him see the world in fractals, in one of the most cited cases of sudden geniuses.
A violent assault transformed Jason Padgett, a young American party-goer, into one of the rare math geniuses who began to see numbers and geometry as images, not just abstractions. The story was told by him to the Outlook program, of the world service of the BBC, in the special series on extraordinary senses, and has as a turning point an assault suffered in 2002.
The most surprising thing is that the change, initially frightening, ended up gaining a medical explanation. After the attack in Tacoma, Washington, Padgett developed obsessive-compulsive disorder, but also began to see the world in mathematical patterns, something later associated with a diagnosis of savant syndrome and synesthesia, confirmed by brain scans. Contrary to what common sense might imagine, the condition did not go unanswered.
The party life that ended one night in 2002
image: Jason Padgett/BBC
Before being among the rare geniuses emerging after a head trauma, Padgett led a life he himself describes as superficial. He was only interested in girls, parties, and alcohol, went out to bars six to seven nights a week, and arrived at work hungover the next day. True to the 80s aesthetic of youth in Alaska, he wore short hair in the front and long in the back and leather jackets without a shirt, and sums up that phase, laughing, as the stereotype of the idiot who walks into a bar.
-
2-month-old baby says “I love you” to parents and the video froze the internet: doctors say most babies only speak after the first year of life
-
At 98 years old, Priscilla Sitienei returned to school in uniform, sits next to children, and has a new dream: to become a doctor, after decades of working as a midwife in rural Kenya.
-
At just 5 years old, a little girl wrote, illustrated, and sold over a thousand copies of a book, and Guinness officially recognized her as the youngest person in the world to publish a work.
-
Son lets his hair grow for two years in silence and surprises his mother who lost her hair permanently after treating a brain tumor: “It was the first time I felt like myself.”
Everything changed suddenly on Friday the 13th of September 2002. It was in Tacoma, Washington, where he had moved shortly before. That night, Padgett went with a friend and the guy she was dating to a karaoke bar and, true to the 80s, sang Blaze of Glory by Bon Jovi, an artist he loved to imitate. On stage, he noticed two men sitting in a corner but paid no attention, not imagining that those strangers would change his life forever.
The robbery at the karaoke exit
IMAGE: iStock/BBC
The episode that would place him on the list of geniuses born from trauma began at the bar’s exit. When the group left the karaoke bar, Padgett felt and heard a strong and sudden blow to the head, which made him fall to his knees, and he saw a white light, as if someone had taken a picture. The friend watched in shock, the guy accompanying her ran away, and people inside the bar watched through the window without acting, while he tried to react by biting one of the attackers’ legs.
Only when one of them demanded the jacket did he understand what was happening. Upon hearing the order, Padgett realized it was a robbery and handed over the jacket, which had only cost US$ 99 and was damaged. The attackers fled, and he was fortunate to be near a hospital, where he was diagnosed with a concussion and a kidney bleed, treated with a painkiller injection, and released to go home.
The OCD and the three years locked at home
The same trauma that would bring him closer to math geniuses also made him ill. The episode left behind an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the fear of what happened, combined with the fact that no one helped him, made Padgett afraid to go out and be around other people. He began living locked at home, with an obsession for cleanliness, washing his hands hundreds of times a day due to an irrational fear of germs, and even disinfected his own money, scrubbing each bill one by one.
Far from family and friends, the disorder went unnoticed. That’s how he lived for three years, without anyone noticing the worsening condition. But the head trauma had left another consequence, much stranger, that literally changed the way he saw the world around him.
When he started seeing fractals
image: iStock
Gradually, everything started to look slightly pixelated, from the clouds to the sun, on the path that would push him into the group of mathematical geniuses. Observing water flowing down the drain, Padgett saw tangents and lines like waves crossing each other, in an experience he found beautiful and at the same time frightening. The pixelated shapes seemed to move within a grid, like in a video game, and had, for him, a mathematical nature.
Curiosity led him to seek answers on the internet. It was there that he learned about fractal geometry, a field propelled by Frenchman Benoit Mandelbrot, where figures repeat to form larger ones and were described as the building blocks of everything that exists in the universe. Padgett realized that everything he saw could be broken down into smaller, yet identical pieces, saw patterns in anything, and made these fractal figures his new obsession, which he began to draw incessantly.
The diagnosis that explained everything: savant syndrome and synesthesia
For a while, the change was as impressive as it was unexplained, until he found a medical answer. The turning point came when Padgett saw an interview on television with Daniel Tammet, a man with Asperger’s, on the autism spectrum, considered a genius in mathematics and linguistics, and one of the so-called savants. It was the first time someone, besides him, talked about how numbers look, which brought him closer to other geniuses with extraordinary minds.
From then on, he sought a specialist to understand his own case. A series of brain scans confirmed that he had savant syndrome, and he was also diagnosed with synesthesia, the condition where senses mix, which explained how he could, in fact, see mathematics. Instead of leaving the mystery open, the diagnosis was, for Padgett, a relief.
The new life, the book, and forgiveness to the aggressor
image: Jason Padgett/ BBC
The desire to understand what he saw took Padgett out of isolation. He sought psychological help for obsessive-compulsive disorder and enrolled in a math course at a nearby university, a turn that not only got him out of the house but also led him to meet the woman who would become his wife, and his life improved drastically. Later, he began traveling the world telling his story and wrote a book about the experience, Struck by Genius, which established him among the recognized geniuses on the subject.
Fame brought an unexpected twist. One of the men who attacked him, whom Padgett had sworn revenge on for years, reached out showing great remorse, attributed the attack to alcohol and drugs, and said that, like him, he had started a new stage in life, free from violence, and Padgett accepted the apology and congratulated him on the change. Even after years of pain and disorder, he states that “he would go through the same thing again to achieve this mathematical awakening,” a personal reflection that does not erase the fact that such outcomes are extremely rare, as a trauma like his almost always brings harm, not talent.
Jason Padgett’s case remains one of the most cited among the rare geniuses who seem to emerge overnight after a blow to the head, but his story also dispels the idea that this would have no explanation. Brain scans linked the ability to see fractals and mathematics to acquired savant syndrome and synesthesia, while the violence left real marks, from concussion and kidney bleeding to obsessive-compulsive disorder and three years of isolation. From a karaoke party singer to a man who reads the universe in repeating patterns, his life turned in a single night, in an extraordinary outcome precisely because it is so uncommon.
And you, what do you think about this ability of the brain to transform so radically? Do you know other cases of geniuses who emerged after trauma or illness, and do you believe such talents were dormant all along? Share your opinion and exchange ideas with other readers on the topic, with respect for different views.
Be the first to react!