He Beaten to Near Death, Wakes Up Seeing What No Human Should See

We now bring you the amazing story of a man whose severe concussion suddenly made him a mathematical savant. It’s a medical mystery that scientists are still trying to unravel. Sometimes the most extraordinary gifts come wrapped in the worst possible packaging.

In 2002, a 31-year-old futon salesman from Tacoma, Washington walked out of a karaoke bar on a Friday night and was viciously attacked by two strangers. He was knocked to the ground, punched, and kicked, and left bleeding on the pavement. The men stole his jacket and vanished into the night. When Jason Padgett woke up the next morning, he had no idea that the blow to his head had done something to his brain that science could barely explain. Something that no ordinary human being should be able to experience. But before Jason could understand what he had become, he would first have to survive the darkest years of his life.

To understand how remarkable Jason’s transformation was, you first have to understand who he was before the attack. Jason Padgett was born in 1970 in Anchorage, Alaska. He grew up there before eventually moving to Tacoma, Washington, where he briefly attended Tacoma Community College. But college wasn’t for him. He had no interest in academics, no ambition, and no direction. He dropped out and went to work as a salesman at his father’s futon store, a business called Planet Futon.

By his own admission, Jason was a shallow guy. His life revolved around partying, chasing girls, drinking, waking up with a hangover, and doing it all over again the next day. He loved extreme sports like skydiving and karate, and he had a mullet. He was the kind of guy who was the life of every party, but had absolutely no plans for the future. He had never progressed beyond pre-algebra in school, and he later admitted that he cheated on everything and never cracked a book. He used to say:

“Math is stupid. How can you use that in the real world?”

He was separated from his wife, but had a young daughter named Megan who visited him regularly. Jason Padgett was, by every measure, an ordinary man living an unremarkable life.

And then came Friday, September 13th, 2002. Jason and his friends had spent the evening at a karaoke bar near his home in Tacoma. It was a regular night out for him, the kind of night he had lived a hundred times before. But as Jason walked out the front door, two men followed him. He made it about 10 steps before a blow struck him in the back of the head, just behind his right ear. Jason saw a bright flash of white light, like someone had taken a photograph inside his skull. He heard a deep, low sound, lower than the lowest key on a piano, and then he went down. He hit the ground on one knee and briefly lost consciousness.

When he came to, the men were on top of him, punching and kicking him over and over. Jason managed to get across the street to Tacoma General Hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with a severe concussion and a bruised kidney. They gave him a shot of pain medication and sent him home that same night. The two men who attacked him were later arrested, but then released. They were never convicted, and for the time being, Jason was left to pick up the pieces of what had just happened to him.

Descending Into the Cave

But the attack at the karaoke bar was only the beginning of Jason’s nightmare. What most people don’t know about that night is that it wasn’t the only devastating thing that happened to Jason. The very same night he was beaten outside that bar, his stepfather, a man he idolized, died of cancer. Then, just 2 weeks later, Jason’s only brother went missing. His body would not be found for another 4 years.

The weight of these three tragedies happening almost simultaneously was more than anyone person could bear, and Jason collapsed under it. In the days that followed the attack, Jason began to behave in ways that were completely unlike him. The man who used to be the center of attention at every party was now terrified of the outside world. He nailed blankets and towels over every window in his house, sometimes as many as three layers. He became paranoid about sunlight. He used spray foam to literally glue his front door shut so that no one could get in. He only left his apartment to buy food, and when he did, he went at night so he wouldn’t have to see anyone.

He developed severe post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and crippling agoraphobia. He would sleep for days at a time, and when he woke up, he would try desperately to fall back asleep. At one point, part of the roof of his apartment caved in, and pigeons started flying in and out, but Jason didn’t care enough to fix it. He called his apartment his cave, and he lived in it like a hermit for 4 years.

The OCD made everything worse. Jason became irrationally afraid of germs, and this had a devastating effect on his relationship with his 5-year-old daughter, Megan, who was his only regular visitor during those years. When Megan would come over, the very first thing Jason would do was take off her shoes, put her in clean clothes, and obsessively wash her hands. He would wash his own hands over and over, terrified of contamination. It wasn’t that he didn’t love Megan. He loved her more than anything in the world, but the OCD had hijacked his brain and turned even the simplest interactions into rituals he couldn’t control.

A New Way of Seeing the World

But, here is where Jason’s story takes a turn that no one could have predicted. While all of these terrible things were happening to him, while he was hiding from the world in his dark apartment, something else was going on. Something that Jason didn’t understand and couldn’t explain. The morning after the attack, Jason woke up and the world looked different. Everything had changed.

Water pouring from the faucet wasn’t smooth anymore. It was made up of tiny lines and angles. A circle wasn’t a circle. It was a polygon with visible zigzag edges made of tiny triangles. Light coming through the window didn’t look like light. It looked like interlocking geometric shapes. Everything around him appeared pixelated and choppy, like a stop-motion film. He described his new vision as discrete picture frames with a line connecting them, but still at real speed, as if his brain was showing him the individual frames of a movie without smoothing them together.

At first, Jason assumed it was a side effect of the medication he had been prescribed at the hospital. He figured it would go away, but it didn’t. The strange vision stayed, and they got more intense. Jason began to notice mathematical patterns everywhere he looked. The spiral of cream stirring into his morning coffee was no longer just a swirl. It was a fractal. A repeating geometric pattern that he could see with perfect clarity. The branches of a tree weren’t random. They were mathematical structures. Even the movement of his own hand through the air left a geometric trail in his mind’s eye.

He started to become obsessed with these patterns, and he began drawing them. Intricate, detailed shapes made of overlapping triangles and repeating geometric structures, all done by hand with nothing but a pencil, a ruler, and a compass. Jason had never been able to draw before in his life, but now he couldn’t stop. The drawings were beautiful and incredibly precise, but Jason had no idea what they were. He had no formal education in mathematics and no framework to understand what his brain was showing him. He just knew that something inside him had changed, and he couldn’t turn it off. Even his dreams were made of geometry.

Jason went to psychiatrists for help with his OCD and PTSD, but none of them could explain why he was seeing the world this way. Then one night, everything clicked. Jason was watching television in his apartment, and a documentary came on about a man named Daniel Tammet. Tammet was a mathematical savant who described seeing the world in geometric shapes and patterns, the exact same way Jason did. It was the first time Jason had ever heard the word savant, and it hit him like a truck. He wasn’t going crazy. Something had happened to his brain during the attack, something that had unlocked a part of his mind that most people never access.

Jason began devouring mathematics and physics journals trying to understand the shapes and patterns he was seeing everywhere. He read about fractals, which are shapes that, when you break them apart into smaller pieces, the pieces look the same as the whole. It was exactly what he had been drawing for years without knowing what it was called.

Then one day, Jason had a chance encounter that changed the trajectory of his life. He was in a shopping mall drawing his geometric shapes when a stranger noticed what he was doing and asked him about it. Jason told the man that he was trying to describe the discrete structure of space-time based on Planck length and quantum black holes. The stranger stared at him. The man was a physicist and he told Jason that what he was drawing was advanced mathematics and that he needed to enroll in math classes immediately. Jason took his advice and signed up for courses at Tacoma Community College, the same school he had dropped out of years earlier. This time, however, things were very different.

The Remarkable Diagnosis and Forgiveness

Around this time, a journalist and author named Maureen Seaberg, who herself has several forms of synesthesia, had set up a Google alert for the word synesthesia on her email account. In November 2010, the alert led her to a YouTube video that Jason had uploaded of himself drawing his intricate geometric patterns. Maureen was stunned by what she saw. She reached out to Jason and after meeting him, she connected him with a neuroscientist named Berit Brogaard and asked if Brogaard would be willing to study Jason’s brain.

Brogaard agreed and invited Jason to the Brain Research Unit at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland where he underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging scans. The researchers showed him mathematical formulas and monitored his brain activity in real time and what they found was extraordinary. The area of Jason’s brain that had been damaged by the attack had forced other parts of his brain to compensate. His visual cortex was now working directly with the area of his brain responsible for mathematical processing. Two parts of the brain that don’t normally communicate were now firing together in ways that the researchers had never seen before.

On top of that, Jason had access to parts of the brain that most people don’t have conscious access to. His brain had literally rewired itself after the injury. The damage had unlocked something that had been lying dormant. The official diagnosis was acquired savant syndrome with a form of synesthesia, a condition so rare that only about 40 to 50 people in the entire world have ever been documented as having it. Jason Padgett, the college dropout who used to sell futons and chase girls at bars, was now one of the rarest mathematical minds on the planet. Jason said:

“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.”

Jason went on to co-author a memoir with Maureen Seaberg called “Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel.” The book was published in 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Sony Pictures picked up the rights to make a movie about his life with Channing Tatum attached to play him. His fractal artwork won best international newcomer at Art Basel Miami Beach, and he began giving TEDx talks and speaking publicly about his experience all over the world. Jason Padgett, the man who once said “Math is stupid,” had become one of the most fascinating case studies in the history of neuroscience.

But perhaps the most remarkable chapter of Jason’s story came 15 years after the attack when he received a message on Facebook that he never expected to see. It read:

“Hello Jason. I’m not sure if you know who I am. My name is Brady Simmons. I am one of the men who assaulted you years ago. I want to open up the possibility for us to connect. I have tremendous remorse for the actions that took place that night.”

Jason was stunned. The message brought back every memory of that horrible night on the pavement outside the karaoke bar. But Brady Simmons was no longer the same man who had attacked him that night. In the years since the assault, Brady had struggled with prescription drug addiction and had even attempted suicide before eventually getting sober and turning his life around. He explained that on the night of the attack, he and the other man had been drinking too much and that he had a drug problem. He said they were going through rough times and that he liked Jason’s jacket. Jason accepted the apology and the two men eventually spoke on the phone. Jason later said:

“We’re both better men than we were back then.”

Jason now lives in Carmel, Indiana with his wife Alaina and their family. And in the most Jason Padgett way possible, he chose where to live by writing a computer program to determine the ideal location. He fed the data into the algorithm and Carmel, Indiana is what came out. He sees the attack not as a tragedy, but as a gift that gave him a completely new life. He can no longer remember what it was like to see the world the way everyone else does. Every curve, every spiral, every drop of water is geometry speaking to him. Jason once wrote:

“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. I believe I am living proof that these powers lie dormant in all of us. It was like a bomb went off in my mind. In a matter of minutes, I was no longer just an ordinary man.”