Health and Medicine
PUBLISHED
Jason Padgett was nobody special. At least, until he was mugged.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.“I was pretty aimless,” he would later write in his 2014 memoir Struck by Genius. He was 31 years old; a community college dropout with a penchant for extreme sports and a full-time job selling futons. He pumped iron; he gelled his hair; he trolled for girls. “I rarely had a serious thought in my head,” he wrote. “My only goal was to live with joyful abandon 24-7.”
And so he did. “I was […] bouncing from one night out to the next,” he wrote. “I was really happy.”
But in September 2002 – on Friday 13, no less – one bad night changed his life forever. For the sake of a couple hundred bucks, a group of guys beat the crap out of him so bad that he lost consciousness: “a blow struck my head just behind my right ear,” he recalled. “There was a flash of white light and I heard a deep low sound, lower than the lowest key on a piano. I went down on one knee and […] the blinding white light went to black.”
The onslaught continued: punches, kicks, slurs, until eventually the attackers tired, taking Padgett’s jacket and running off. “I struggled to my feet,” Padgett wrote. “I was in a lot of pain […] The world looked different: off kilter, dreamlike.”
“Everything that moved had trails of colored light following close behind it,” he explained. “There were triangles and squares in repeating patterns wherever I looked, from the windows to the lampposts to the street signs […] The glow of the streetlights seemed amplified. I could see the cars going by, little chipped shapes bouncing off their hoods.”
A trip to the hospital confirmed what you probably already suspect: along with a baseball-sized bruise on his kidney, Padgett was suffering from “a profound concussion,” his doctors said. It would take some time – he should expect to be peeing blood for a few days, and would likely experience some pretty significant mental symptoms for a while – but he would, eventually, get back to normal.
“I trusted that I would recover,” Padgett said. “I had no idea that I’d left the old Jason behind, lying in a heap on that sidewalk.”
A sudden genius
Padgett’s concussion would never go away, in the end – not exactly, anyway. From the very next morning, he started noticing mathematical shapes and patterns in the world around him; motion was now a series of discrete images, and curved lines had become a collection of countless vertices.
At the same time, math – a subject that he had always previously spurned – seemed to flow through him like electricity. It sparked out of him in the form of geometrical drawings and art – sketches that caught the eye not just of the public, but of a local physicist who urged Padgett to enrol in college to study math. He did just that, eventually becoming recognized for his skill in number theory.
So how did a mullet-headed partier become such a math whiz? The culprit is “a remarkable condition known as acquired savant syndrome,” wrote Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist who specialized in the epidemiology of autism and savant syndrome, back in 2015.
Unlike the more familiar form of savantism – the kind exemplified in Rain Man’s Raymond Babbitt – acquired savant syndrome is when “near-genius levels of artistic or intellectual skills show up after dementia,” Treffert explained, “[or] a severe blow to the head or another insult to the brain.”
Padgett is one of only a very few people who have become these sudden geniuses – probably only around 90 known cases ever, some experts estimate. But each one is a striking account of mental rags-to-riches: a bookseller who, after being thrown from a carriage, became a world-renowned photographer and inventor; a chiropractor who had a stroke and became an artistic savant; a white-collar worker who cracks his head in the pool and becomes a musical prodigy; a 10-year-old who got hit in the head with a baseball, and was left with the ability to recall the exact details of any date from that point on.
“[I] wouldn't give it up for anything,” Padgett told CBS News in 2014. “We all have this ability within us.”
Is he right?
How to become a savant
Look, we’ll say it: sudden traumatic brain injuries are not usually associated with an improvement to cognitive abilities. So how is it that, every so often, an injury or condition that should be debilitating is instead such a mental boon?
The truth is, we’re not quite sure – but we have some ideas. Some experts think it’s to do with serotonin: trauma leads to a sudden surge in the hormone, which triggers some kind of synesthesia in the affected person. Regions of the brain that are usually separated become intertwined, opening up new ways of experiencing the world – and understanding it.
It’s a theory that certainly jibes with Padgett’s experience, but would the evidence back it up? In fact, yes: “We’ve found permanent changes [in the brain],” Berit Brogaard, a neuroscientist who took fMRI scans of Padgett’s back brain in 2012, told the BBC in 2018. “You can actually see connections in the brain that weren’t there before.”
That’s not the only explanation, however. Another possibility presented itself in 1998, when a group of neurologists from UCLA noticed a striking correlation between the progression of some of their patients’ dementia and artistic ability.
“The painters remembered realistic landscapes, animals, or people; one woman hand-crafted small figures; and a photographer captured scenes in rural Guatemala,” the researchers reported. “The painters seemed to recall images that were then mentally reconstructed as pictures without the mediation of language […] despite progressive cognitive and social impairment, they showed increasing interest in the fine detail of faces, objects, shapes, and sounds.”
In this case, the theory isn’t that brain connectivity is increased – it’s the opposite. The patients didn’t just have standard dementia: they were diagnosed with a particular type which only affects the frontal lobe. It “often targets the left anterior temporal area of the brain and the orbitofrontal cortex,” Treffert explained. “Both regions normally inhibit activity in the visual system at the back of the brain, which is involved in processing incoming signals from the eyes.”
For these emerging artists, then, the damage to these areas was akin to cutting the brakes on how their brains interpreted sight and sound. “It unleashes artistic or other creative sensibilities,” Treffert wrote, “even though damage to the frontal lobes may lead to the inappropriate behaviors that characterize the disorder.”
Unlocking what’s within
Like Padgett, Treffert had an optimistic view of acquired savant syndrome. “These instant savants […] ‘know things’ innately they were never taught,” he wrote. “Acquired savantism provides strong evidence that a deep well of brain potential resides within us all.”
Perhaps one day, he suggested, we might be able to stimulate individual brain regions to induce savantism in ourselves – indeed, there’s already some evidence that this is possible. It offers an intriguing insight into how humans learn: if the Average Joe (or, indeed, Jo) has the ability to create sonatas or masterpieces within them despite never reading music or studying art before, then how is it that knowledge is imparted at all?
Perhaps, Treffert suggested, it was inside us all along. “The brain may come loaded with a set of innate predispositions for processing what it sees or for understanding the ‘rules’ of music, art or mathematics,” he wrote. “Savants can tap into that inherited knowledge far better than the average person can.”
“The challenge now is to find the best ways to tap into our inner savant – that little bit of Rain Man – while keeping the rest of our mental faculties intact.”
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