Jason Padgett, an aspiring mathematician and number theorist, is one of very few individuals in the world with acquired savant syndrome. He wasn't always this way.
He scraped by in high school by copying the work of his friends, and only graduated because one of those friends did his homework for him for a final.
Padgett: "That gives you an idea about how seriously I took school.... I had a very shallow life."
But one night outside of a karaoke bar, his life was changed dramatically. He was severely beaten in a mugging gone wrong.
"Immediately, everything," quite literally, "looked different." He explains that he began to see motion as a series of discreet events, much like how a mechanical flip book might display moving images.
One day, obsessively drawing fractals and Pi, he heard Daniel Tammet talk about synesthesia. Padgett realized that Tammet's experience was much like his, and that the experience of seeing the world as start and stop, as a series of shapes and numbers, was not unique. While the attack had left him with serious post-traumatic stress syndrome and in self-imposed exile away from anyone and everyone outside his home, the feeling he had for the first time in a long time was one of overwhelming relief. His condition had a name.
As he explained, "I didn't want to be that crazy guy who didn't know he was crazy."
He put some of his mathematical drawings online tagged with the word "synesthesia," and an expert on the condition contacted him. Functional MRIs later revealed that he had "conscious access," in his words, to parts of the brain that most humans "don't have access to." Physical changes in his brain could explain his attraction to Pi and his intense interest in mathematics.
Watching Padgett talk, it's clear that the recovery process, understandably, is ongoing. No longer that disinterested young man - his words - content to get by, he has a curiosity about the world around him. He explains that he feels much more deeply than he did in his old life. Moreover, he connects the interior landscape smeared with numbers and a developing skill in advanced mathematics to a person that has been changed for the better.
Describing why the Doppler effect is the result of compressing sound waves, which we hear as a higher pitch sound as they approach and a gradually lowered pitch noise as they expand and move away, he connects that phenomenon to special relativity. Using the wave-like property of light, astronomers, he explains, are able to measure "red shift" to approximate the immense distances in the universe. In a poetic turn, he says that if an observer were able to stand with him while he rushed away at the speed of light while another were to remain stationary, the blue shirt he was wearing today would appear red to person left behind, while his companion would continue to see blue. Relativistic physics are well established in that regard. But "in fact," he adds, "if everyone in the universe could see him" at that moment, his shirt would be every color.
His point: we need every kind of mind.
In the following question and answer session, Padgett tells the audience in evident disbelief that a movie of his life will be opening in the next year or so. Channing Tatum will play him. "And," he adds, a bit chuffed at the idea, "he is taking math classes to prepare for the role."
Wayne