Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel (2 page)

I sit down at the kitchen table and add to whatever sketch I’m working on; lately, I’ve been drawing the coffee-and-cream spiral. I’m a real perfectionist and I can stay in my seat for hours and draw; usually, I do this until I have to leave for work. When it’s finally time to go, I put on my “uniform”—a button-down shirt and jeans. I like to look professional but I’m not really one to wear a suit and I often have to lift heavy things or repair stuff at work. I make sure I close the door behind me carefully. I always have to check and double-check and triple-check the locks. Then I can go.

I used to drive my wife, Elena, to school in the morning. I did it partly because I like spending as much time as possible with her, but it was also a matter of her safety. Until very recently, we lived in a not-so-friendly part of Tacoma called Hilltop. Our house was next door to a soup kitchen, and while I was sympathetic to its patrons, a few of the folks were tough characters. Sometimes it was like running a gauntlet in the alley beside our house just to get to our car. I could handle it, but if anyone ever hurt Elena, I don’t know what I’d do. Some of the homeless people hung out on our porch waiting for the soup kitchen to open. One time I tripped over a man sleeping at the foot of our front door. He just moaned and didn’t move an inch.

Owing to the nearby jail, our street was filled with storefront offices that housed bail bondsmen and defense lawyers, and the foot traffic was made up of people who required their services. Many of them were gang members. A lot of the crimes they were accused of stemmed from the crack and methamphetamine epidemics in Washington State. During the twelve years I lived there, I came to recognize a lot of the characters; they showed up again and again—repeat offenders, I guess. Even the name of the local sandwich place was inspired by the atmosphere: the 911 Deli. Lunch emergencies were the least of my neighborhood’s problems.

But the location was convenient for me and Elena because we both attended nearby colleges. Elena was studying business, and I’d returned to school to learn all I could about math and physics. I’d dropped out years before my injury due to poor grades and the fact that school just didn’t interest me. I made it through only half of my sophomore year of college. I had to drop out again a few years ago to take care of my health and the family business, but I recently re-enrolled. My instructors say I have an incredible and inexplicable grasp of theory, considering that I’ve never studied these subjects formally before, but I still need to learn the basics. Although it’s easy for me to understand the mathematical nature of the universe now, I don’t have the background to express it verbally. But I’m really happy to be in school. For the first time in my life, I’m taking my education seriously.

During my morning drives, which now start at Browns Point, I sing along to the radio and do my best to concentrate on the traffic, but there’s a lot competing for my attention. I’m constantly watching the light play off cars, including the hood of my own, and it seems to signal to me something about the relative speeds of vehicles on the road. The length of the light between the cars I see in stop-action frames is a short filament; when things move faster, this light stream is longer. I found out in school that this image I see could be a textbook description of accepted theories on derivatives of position and velocity that lead to acceleration in physics. I find it’s more reliable to react to these visuals than to people’s brake lights. The shape of the sky itself as I look out my windshield can be a distraction too. Its half-dome curvature reminds me of pi, the irrational number that represents the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. Most of us have seen pi written as 3.14 or 3.14159, but the digits actually never end. Pi goes on into infinity and never repeats, which is why it’s called an irrational number and also why it’s so fascinating to me. I draw pi constantly as a circle subdivided by triangles, and I’ve gotten so that I can fit 720 triangles into the circle. I’d put more in there but that’s the highest number I can produce before the width of the pencil lead causes the lines to run together.

When I drive past the city’s harbor—Commencement Bay—I’m always on the lookout for rainbows. The stormy conditions of Washington State turn the sky over this body of water—full of frolicking seals and the occasional orca—into a real rainbow factory in spite of the industrial smokestacks spewing smog into the air overhead. Each time I see one I’m reminded of their geometry. To me, they are a reflection of pi. I’m apt to pull over the car and text people when I see an exceptional one:
Double bow! Three o’clock!

My first stop after passing the harbor is often the office of the doctor or the physical therapist to deal with chronic pain from old injuries. Both offices tend to be busy, and I usually have to wait, but I have no problem keeping myself occupied. Downtime gives me the opportunity to think.

While other patients reach for the dog-eared magazines, I imagine myself shrinking down to a microscopic level, no larger than a bacterium. My perspective shifts until I can no longer see the ceiling above me, and the end table in the corner of the room sprawls out like a giant, unexplored plain. I begin taking microscopic steps, and I come upon a spot on the table where a fellow patient’s filling out her paperwork, pressing her ballpoint pen into the medical form’s surface. After she finishes and moves the paper aside, I find myself lost in the huge crater: the indent in the wood formed when she dotted an
i.
Like an explorer, I hike its entirety, traversing the valley in half an hour or so and looking at the grains of the wood as if I were in the middle of a gargantuan forest. I climb to the surface and look across the expanse of the indents left from the other letters and numbers she wrote. They spread out before me like the mysterious Nazca lines of Peru and I forget for a moment how they were made and puzzle over them. When the receptionist calls my name, I’m pulled out of the rabbit hole, and I walk into the office thinking that this is my particular theory of relativity. The table looks smooth from a human perspective, but we’d need only to shrink down to a smaller perspective to experience the textures I imagined. Everything is relative to your place in the world. Speaking of which, I’m also a real champ at waiting in line at the bank. I think it’s a stroke of luck not to know boredom anymore.

Despite my very rich inner life, like anyone, I have to come back down to earth to deal with the day-to-day business of survival. I make my living at a place called Planet Futon. Seriously. When I get to work, there are usually a dozen fires to put out right away that snap me out of my reverie and into the here and now. It’s a family business. My dad owns the furniture factory in Illinois that supplies our three stores in the Tacoma area, and I have managed them for him on and off since 2001, spending most of my time at the flagship store. It’s important to have a member of the family in charge, otherwise people might rob you blind. I know because I took a little time off recently, and it wasn’t long before one of the workers was offering customers discounts for using cash, delivering the furniture himself, and then keeping the money. Also, if a piece of furniture is missing a part, the workers tend to poach that part off the brand-new furniture instead of just ordering it, which creates a cascade of problems. The stores support not only my household but also my dad’s. Most of the responsibility of making them profitable falls on my shoulders. As grateful as I am for the job, it puts a tremendous amount of pressure on me, and I don’t handle stress as well as I used to. In the old days, I met it head-on, but now I avoid any and all confrontations. This new personality trait is something my doctors consider a tradeoff, a drawback that comes with my new abilities.

As hard as it is to manage employees and keep the fleet of delivery trucks humming, I enjoy my interactions with our customers. Some salespeople talk to shoppers about the weather or last night’s game to break the ice, and that’s fine. I used to do the same thing. But now I talk to them about geometry and physics. You’d be surprised how positively people respond—even people who didn’t think they cared a whit about either topic. The trick is to make it relevant. It’s as easy as describing the mechanism of the fulcrum that opens a futon; I do that, and we’re off.

I’m forty-three as of this writing. This makes me really happy because 43 is a prime number, divisible by only itself and 1. The number 43 lives at a specific point in a sphere in my mind’s eye, as do all the other primes. I’ve drawn images of this sphere, which is consistent for me whenever I think of primes and the patterns among them. I feel such a reverence for these numbers that I recite them like a mantra when I need good luck or when I need to keep bad luck away. It’s as if the primes are so rare and so special that they’re imbued with an extraordinary power, and they act like sentinels in my mind. When I’m napping on the sofa, my daughter, Megan, sometimes wakes me up because I’m reciting prime numbers in my sleep.

But primes aren’t the only numbers I associate with shapes. Simply dialing a friend’s phone number can send up a plume of images. Numbers appear to me as a series of cubes. They are linear—three cubes across for the number 3, four across for 4—unless the numbers are part of an equation or they’re being plotted on a graph, in which case the cubes move around to reflect what’s happening to the numbers. An equation can result in a huge, prismatic net right before my eyes. The shapes are always consistent with the specific stimulus. Numbers are an obsession, and I’m incapable of turning the fixation off. I can’t climb stairs without counting them, and I can’t eat without counting how many times I’ve chewed each bite. I never chew gum for this reason. With every number I count off, the fresh, simple prime numbers and all the other never-ending numbers spiral into their own shapes.

All these visions—and every shape I encounter out in the world—correlate with fractals, the elemental geometric building blocks found in nature. Snowflakes, lightning bolts, and coastlines are all fractals, meaning their subsections repeat the same patterns as their wholes. Coastlines are particularly intriguing to me because their overall measurements actually change depending on the scale one uses. For me, this underscores how understanding fractals can shed light on comprehending the nature of other things. For example, I have always wanted to know where humans come from. Now, with one quick glance at human anatomy, I see clearly that veins, arteries, and even the strands of DNA are fractals too. The human body seems to reflect the very structure of creation. The structures within the body reflect the never-ending repeating patterns found throughout the universe. The first time I noticed this, it struck me: everything and everyone is a reflection of this repeating structure.

I walk around in a near-constant state of inspiration with a great hunger for knowledge, and I read everything I can about math and physics, often developing my own theories along the way. I was even contacted by a Toronto financial firm that was interested in applying my fractal geometry to the stock market. I haven’t begun working with them yet, but I love the idea that my wild visions could have an application in the real world.

It’s especially important for me to keep drawing my geometry, because that’s how I’m able to share exactly what’s going on in my mind, and I think I’d go crazy if I didn’t have a way to express what I see. By turning my view of the world into drawings, I’ve found a way to explain my universe to other people.

My quest to understand and come to terms with the new me has spanned more than a decade, taking me from years of self-imposed isolation to a high-tech brain-imaging lab halfway across the world, in Helsinki, Finland. Along the way, I’ve met some of the world’s greatest experts on savant syndrome, synesthesia, and brain science. I’ve learned what my mathematical theories and visions have in common with the work of some of the most brilliant mathematicians in history. I’ve been introduced to new ways of thinking about the brain, the mind, and even consciousness, and I’ve discovered why my case may play an instrumental role in the next generation of cutting-edge brain science.

I’ve spent plenty of time pondering the very fabric of the universe and how we fit into it. And I’ve concluded that no matter what you go through in life, in the end, there is a symmetry to it all—an order amid the seeming disorder. And if you could see what I see, you’d know that you’re an essential part of that order.

If I could draw the world as I see it and show every last person how he or she is enmeshed in this fine and intricate and impossibly beautiful structure, perhaps people would stop getting lost in the hurt of things and be elevated by the wonder of it all. In fact, I know they would. I know, because even though I seem like the most optimistic man this side of the Rocky Mountains, I’ve been to hell and back.

Chapter Two

T
HERE WAS ONCE
a time when, apart from tallying my bar tab or cashing my paycheck or counting repetitions when I did curls at the gym, I was blissfully unaware of mathematics. In fact, I was more than unaware; I was math-averse. In school, I was like so many other students: the only questions I had for my math teachers were “When am I going to use that?” and “How does this apply to anything in the real world?” I never made it past pre-algebra, much less developed any theories about the geometric underpinnings of the universe.

Back then, nothing I was taught in school seemed relevant. I wasn’t motivated and I got terrible grades. I didn’t have much of an attention span. I liked to party. I was an adrenaline junkie, always in search of the next fix. Eventually I dropped out of college.

Life was meant to be enjoyed, after all, and there was nothing fun about math or science or academic pursuits of any kind—all of which required sitting still. I was out every night of the week after school or after work. Now, that was fun. My main concerns were where I’d be partying that night, which girls I’d be meeting, and what drinks I’d be drinking. When I lived in Alaska, which I did on and off through my teens and early twenties, that meant meeting Justin, John, Rick, and Alicia at Chilkoot Charlie’s (“Where we cheat the other guy and pass the savings on to you!”); Hot Rods, with its lineup of muscle cars on display; or Asia Gardens, for a little (or a lot of) karaoke. When I was in Tacoma, my entourage was Angela, Tina, and Clark, and we’d end up at either Café Arizona or Shogun’s after a game of ultimate Frisbee. I was never alone.