Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel (10 page)

This concept made a great deal of sense to me, since I was certain that nothing I was currently thinking came from my memory. I just had not been exposed to the topics that now interested me, and I’d never learned how to do the things I could now do. The thought that this was some sort of hidden instinct, passed down through the ages, was thrilling.

What wasn’t so thrilling was the fact that so many of the savants I was reading about had numerous mental challenges despite their “islands of genius,” as Dr. Treffert described their extraordinary abilities. I didn’t feel as disadvantaged as they were, but it did make me worry I might lose some of my normal faculties if this savant syndrome progressed somehow. I had heard the unfortunate term
idiot savant
before, and in my research I learned that it was coined in 1887 by the same man who first described the disorder we know as Down syndrome: British physician John Langdon Down.
Idiot
was not as pejorative back then, and the word
savant
came from the French word
savoir,
“to know.” (Today, the constellation of symptoms is referred to as
savant syndrome;
it’s best not to use the term
autistic savant,
since only about 50 percent of people with savant syndrome are autistic.) In his three decades of work at an asylum, Down identified ten people who had both significant mental challenges and remarkable skills in specific areas. The people he studied had extraordinary musical, artistic, mathematical, or mechanical skills as well as astounding memories; they were not allowed in mainstream society due to their mental deficits apart from these skills. My throat tightened as I thought about a time when people with savant syndrome were institutionalized.

The first textbook to include descriptions of savants was written in 1914 by A. F. Tredgold. It had a title that stung:
Mental Deficiency.
I found a scanned copy of the original book in an online database and pored over the yellowed pages. Tredgold dedicated the book “To all those persons of sound mind who are interested in the welfare of their less fortunate fellow-creatures,” and included a chapter called “Idiot Savants.” In it, he reviewed everything that had been written on the subject so far. I cringed when I read his assertion that savants weren’t really idiots but rather “imbeciles or merely feeble-minded.” It was painful to see people described this way. But when I read that Tredgold believed that a savant’s talent must be due to “constant exercise,” or practice, I knew he was dead wrong. I had never practiced any of my new talents; they just appeared. Seeing how off base he was about this aspect of savantism made it easier for me to disregard his other hurtful comments.

In all my research on savant syndrome, I’ve been most drawn to the stories of those people who, like me, suddenly acquired this gift. One of them was Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon from New York. In 1994, at the age of forty-two, he was using a pay phone during a rainstorm and was struck by lightning. When the bolt coursed through his body, he had the experience of being outside of himself. “I saw my own body on the ground,” he told Oliver Sacks in an interview for
The New Yorker
. “I said to myself, ‘Oh, shit, I’m dead.’ . . . Then—slam! I was back.”

Aside from feeling tired and having a few problems with memory, Dr. Cicoria was okay. Like me, he had a neurological evaluation that didn’t indicate any permanent brain damage. But also like me, he found his life changing in very unexpected ways. Lucky for him, his memory problems went away. In their place, he told Sacks, “Suddenly over two or three days, there was this insatiable desire to listen to piano music.” Nobody was more surprised about this new affinity for music than Cicoria. He’d never really been interested in piano music until that point. This made me think about my own newfound interest in math and fractals after a lifetime of hating math.

What’s more, Dr. Cicoria soon felt it wasn’t enough just to listen to the piano; he had an urge to play. He then started hearing original music in his head and had a desire to compose. So he began to study music. He still worked full-time as a surgeon and was unchanged in every other regard, but soon he was rising at 4:00 a.m. to practice, and after work, he played well into the night. It was a miraculously happy story, I thought, until I read that he and his wife divorced in 2004. When I learned that, I was so grateful that I hadn’t been married before my injury. Can you imagine your spouse waking up to a stranger every day? I don’t know how any of my former girlfriends would have reacted to having to sit with me, housebound, while I stared off into space pondering my visions or sat for hours doing research. I began to wonder if I’d ever find anyone who could tolerate me as I was now.

As much as that story made me reflect on the loneliness of the acquired savant, I took joy in the next several cases I studied. I particularly liked the story of Alonzo Clemons of Boulder, Colorado. As an infant, he suffered a brain injury in a fall, and though he could scarcely speak in complete sentences, Clemons could sculpt out of clay any animal he saw in uncanny detail, using no tools other than his hands. In fact, all he needed to do was glance at the animal once, and then he stored the image photographically in his mind and could complete an entirely accurate sculpture. His desire to sculpt started shortly after his head injury. As a child, he would take the shortening out of the cupboards in his family home and set to work compulsively sculpting animals; finally, someone bought him some clay. To this day, wherever he goes, he carries with him a duffle bag with several bricks of clay, just in case he sees something he has to sculpt. After reading his story, I was really glad my injury didn’t rob me of the ability to communicate. I didn’t choose to communicate often, but something inside me was compelled to share what I knew.

Clemons worked on his sculptures for twenty years in solitude. But when the film
Rain Man,
which was inspired by the remarkable abilities of the savant Kim Peek, came out, the public became more interested in Clemons’s work. He now shows his art and has been featured on many TV shows, including
60 Minutes
and the Discovery Channel’s
World of Wonder.

Not far from Clemons, in Denver, lives another man who acquired savant abilities. Derek Amato was forty when hijinks at a backyard barbecue changed his life. Someone tossed a football near the in-ground pool, and then the game became catching the football over the water. On one toss, Amato dove into the shallow end of a pool and struck his head on the pool’s floor. “I remember the impact being very loud. It was like a bomb had gone off. And I knew I hit my head hard enough that I was hurt. I knew I was hurt badly,” he said in a Science Channel documentary. He felt like blood was pouring out of his ears, though it was not. He was admitted to the hospital with a serious concussion and soon noticed some memory loss and hearing loss.

A few days after the barbecue, he was released from the hospital, and he sat down at a keyboard at a friend’s house and began to play. Though he’d played a little guitar, he had never played piano before, but suddenly he was a virtuoso. It was original music. And it was beautiful. He continued until about two the next morning, afraid the ability would be short-lived. He and his friend couldn’t understand what was happening. “It was no ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’” Amato said.

“As I shut my eyes, I found these black-and-white structures moving from left to right, which in fact would represent, in my mind, a fluid and continuous stream of musical notation,” Amato later wrote in a blog post on the Wisconsin Medical Society’s website. “I could not only play and compose, but I would later discover that I could recall a prior played piece of music as if it had been etched in my mind’s eye.”

In an interview on the
Today
show, Amato admitted that there were downsides to the injury. “I deal with the fluorescent-light issues,” he told Matt Lauer. “I collapse sometimes out of the blue. And the migraines and the headaches are intense. And my hearing is half gone.” He called the lingering symptoms “a price tag on this particular gift.” When I heard him say that on the video, I thought of my own OCD, PTSD, and other problems. I agreed with him that though these issues presented a challenge, I wouldn’t trade my new abilities for life without them.

Orlando Serrell is another interesting acquired savant. In 1979, when he was ten years old, he was playing baseball, and while he was making a run for first base, a baseball struck him on the left side of the head. He fell to the ground and remained there for a few moments, then got up and continued to play. “I didn’t tell my parents, therefore, I had no medical treatment for the accident,” he wrote on his website. He did have a headache for a long while following the incident, he said. Soon, he noticed he had developed the ability to do calendrical calculations; he could tell you the day of the week associated with any date. If you said,
March 28, 1957,
he would answer, correctly,
Thursday.
He can also tell you what the weather was and what he was doing on any given day since his accident. In 2002 he was invited by NBC’s
Dateline
to undergo a brain scan at Columbia University, and he appeared in a special on savants. His case made me want to know exactly which parts of my brain had been affected by my injury.

I was glad to finally come across the case of a female with savant syndrome, as the condition is even more rare in women. According to experts, when it comes to savant syndrome, men outnumber women by about six to one. Why? Researchers are still trying to figure it out, but some theories suggest that it may have something to do with the way the brain develops in the womb. Also, the savant syndrome is often associated with autism, and autism is more common in males.

The lone female savant I came across was a child named Nadia. In the 1970s, she drew beautiful pictures of horses, and her drawings were so fine they were compared to those of Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci. But she lost her drawing abilities when she learned to speak, according to the British psychologist Lorna Selfe.

I cobbled together what I was learning about acquired synesthesia and savantism to get a better picture of what was going on in my own mind. The stories of people with such gifts were comforting to me, though I hadn’t yet come across anyone with what I suspected I had, both acquired synesthesia and acquired savantism. The experiences of savants and synesthetes still didn’t explain what was happening in my life. Even Tammet had had what I considered the good fortune to be born the way he was. I doubted he could truly relate to my conflicted feelings about my new identity. My alternating shock and euphoria about the emergence of my new sensory perceptions added a layer to the experience I’m not sure people who’ve had synesthesia or savant syndrome their whole lives can imagine. Would I ever feel at home in my own skin and have that sort of acceptance and grace about my abilities?

Though I looked to Tammet and other fellow synesthetes and savants with extraordinary gifts for clues and guidance, I was left with the feeling I would have to forge my own path.

Chapter Seven

I
N MY ISOLATION
, I felt the profound change of the shape of my own world. My life used to be a mile wide and an inch deep: I covered a lot of ground running around, but I barely scratched the surface of things with my superficial pursuits. Now, it was an inch wide and a mile deep. I was practically immobile, working from my spot at the computer most days. I focused on the tiniest thing and pondered it incessantly, plumbing this narrow but very deep space.

It was during this time of major shifts in my perception—started by my trauma and made greater by this silent laboratory of sorts—that I found my intellectual passion. I became fascinated with pi, that irrational, infinite number that corresponds to a circle’s circumference divided by its diameter. To me, that irrational number became a fundamental building block of everything around me, a signifier of nature’s perfect symmetry, repeated over and over throughout our world. I saw it everywhere I looked with my new brain: in light reflected off glass, in the corona of a street lamp, even in the virtual scaffolding of a rainbow.

My fascination with pi began in 2005. On a rare foray outside, I noticed the light bouncing off a car window in the form of an arc, and the concept came to life. Like most visual phenomena now, it was hardly just light bouncing off glass but an extraordinary geometric display: a ball of light was where the beam hit the glass. Rays fanned out from it like the spokes of an illuminated bicycle wheel or the radii of a circle. They were iridescent and I was rapt and lost in the potential infinity of it all. It looked like a laser light show my favorite bar might have put on in the old days, only a million times better. Staring at the display, I felt an overwhelming sense of stimulation and inspiration. To the new me, so entranced by math and physics for the first time, it was a revelation.

I was literally fist-pumping and saying, “Oh my God! This is amazing!” over and over that day when I first understood that what I was seeing was a representation of pi. It clicked for me because the circle I saw was subdivided by the light rays and I realized each ray was really a representation of the radius dividing the circle into pieces. I realized that if I added up the areas of all these pieces, which were sort of like slices of a cake, they would equal the circle’s area. Measuring that value would be a much easier way to figure out the value of pi than the difficult “circumference of a circle divided by its diameter” method I had once struggled to understand in school. In my Internet searches about circles and diameters and radii, I had learned that pi was a confounding problem because the circumference divided by the diameter was irrational: rather than corresponding to a clean fraction, the number stretched out to infinity in decimal form, with no repeating pattern. If you divide 1 by 3, you get 0.33333333, with 3s repeating forever. Divide 1 by 7 and you get the infinitely repeating pattern 0.142857142857142857. Divide a circle’s circumference by its diameter and you get a number that begins 3.14159265358 and just keeps going. Mathematicians are still calculating new digits of pi, out into the quadrillions, and no one has yet found a real repeating pattern. No wonder it had always been so hard to understand.