Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel (22 page)

BOOK: Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel
6.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

 

Elena and I, in our courting days, visiting the home of the great Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin. I’ve seen so much more of the world thanks to Elena.

 

This is me in 2011 on the stage at Aula Magna Hall in Stockholm, where some of the Nobel Prizes are awarded each year. I was getting ready to make my debut at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference, and for a moment I turned away from the spotlight, which struck me with its beautiful rays as a reflection of how I measure pi as a circle subdivided by triangles.

 

This is me being tested by the transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) device in Helsinki, Finland. Don’t you think I look like Anakin Skywalker?

Chapter Thirteen

Savant and Yogi?

T
HOUGH I WAS
happy and inspired by my trip to New York, the flight back to Tacoma turned out to be a difficult one for me physically. I fidgeted the entire six hours to relieve aches and pains and was incredibly stiff and sore upon arrival. With the trip to Stockholm only a few months away, I worried that I’d have an even more difficult time during my next flight. My doctor recommended a pain-management clinic and I signed up immediately.

Attending the clinic was like a job; it required me to go five days a week for eight hours a day for two months. On the menu of services were meditation, exercise, group therapy, and regular medical consultations with a team of doctors. The meditation and group therapy were new experiences for me, and I was somewhat nervous about trying them. I found myself once again taking time off from the futon store. I was pretty useless there anyway, as I was in so much pain.

Elena was really concerned about me during this time. She told me she thought the words
pain-management clinic
sounded really awful and she was worried that I needed something so serious. But we thought I should try it, as nothing else was making me better.

“I want you to imagine your whole body relaxing,” said our soft-spoken meditation leader on the first day; I was lying flat on a mat on the floor. “Breathe in, breathe out, from your belly to your chest; deep, deep breaths.”

I watched as not only my chest but also my stomach rose. It was incredible how much more air I could get in my lungs that way.

“Now imagine the tips of your fingers relaxing, feel it through your wrists; now your elbows . . . Continue to breathe in and breathe out from your stomach. Feel the relaxation extend to your shoulders.”

I felt my arms turn to Jell-O. I had never once in my life stopped so completely to focus on relaxing. It felt amazing.

“Now pause and relax everything some more, take it further.”

I didn’t think it was possible to go even more limp and more relaxed, but I followed the instruction and found myself practically sinking into the hardwood floor beneath me.

For five to ten minutes, I felt a weird but totally pleasant and warm state of well-being. When we rose slowly from the mats at the end of the exercise, my pain was lessened. It was a watershed moment for me. I never knew I had this ability inside me. I’d been so frenetic for years, and stillness had been the furthest thing from my mind. Even in my years of isolation in my home, my mind had been racing. No one was more surprised than me that there was actually something to this meditation practice. Perhaps my mind really could help heal my body, I thought.

I became more practiced at meditation in the coming days and weeks, and the instructor asked me to participate in a little experiment. I was game. He hooked me up to some electrodes and tested my ability to self-modulate. He had me look at an electronic monitor as sine wave after sine wave went by like a series of hills on a cross-country drive. I tried to make the apex of each wave as round as possible through regular, deep breathing and focused attention.

“Okay, I’ve got this!” I said excitedly at one point, noticing how I was able to help form a beautiful, symmetrical wave every ten seconds.

The instructor next took my pulse and blood pressure. I’d succeeded in lowering both considerably in our session. He was amazed to learn the temperature of my skin had gone up about six or seven degrees—something he’d never recorded a person doing on a first try before, he said.

“You’re really good at this for a beginner, Jason—bravo!” he remarked. “Now, make sure you continue to practice at home.”

When we were finished I walked over to the chalkboard in the room and drew a blood vessel—a cylinder, really—for the instructor to consider. I drew cross sections of it in a subsequent rendering and explained how my temperature was raised due to increased blood flow and surface area in my vessels.

“That’s right!” said the instructor.

“Even our bodies come down to geometry,” I said with a smile as I turned to leave.

I was really fascinated by this practice and so convinced of its healing effects that I started telling friends and relatives that it should be taught to every human being, everywhere. In fact, I said, I believed that young children should learn this in school. It was as important as any other skill we could acquire in life. I bet it would have a positive effect on global relations if everyone would take the time to meditate each day.

While meditating at home once, I found myself thinking of a pentagon, like the one I’d seen on my late stepfather’s uniform. I started to draw it, exploring its inner space with additional lines and angles according to things I was now seeing in my mind’s eye, inspired by the initial shape. Only this time, instead of the image being extremely beautiful and two-dimensional, it was much more beautiful and seemed to appear in three dimensions. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was as though I had just stepped from a gray Kansas plain into the Technicolor land of Oz.

I sat there exploring this development for some time. I noticed I could shift my attention and throw the shapes out from my mind’s eye into space around me so that I was standing amid them. Then I could move my attention toward them and float over them, under them, even behind them, projecting my awareness out into space. It was so cool. I stared at it and saw how it had depth for the first time, and I was transfixed. Some lines appeared to be behind other ones instead of flat as they had before. I’d never seen anything so stunning.

I arrived early to the pain-management clinic the next day just to report this to my instructor. “Perhaps because of your practice, your mind is refining these images even further,” he said, delighted.

 

 

I continued to work on my first 3-D drawing in celebration of this development. The image, which I titled “Quantum Star,” came to me as I explored the inner spaces of a pentagon.

I told Maureen about this development and she thought it was so significant she put me in touch with another conference participant I would be presenting with in Stockholm, the medical anthropologist William C. Bushell, then the director of East-West Research for Tibet House in New York. The Harvard- and MIT-trained researcher had spent thirty years documenting the health benefits of meditation and had heard about all sorts of experiences, many of them from really adept yogis and lamas from the Indo-Tibetan tradition. At Tibet House, Dr. Bushell worked with the Columbia professor Robert Thurman, an Indo-Tibetan studies scholar who also happened to be the actress Uma Thurman’s father. Together, the researchers ran their own conferences featuring His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other great meditation experts.

I still wondered if what I was seeing was tied to some fundamental fabric of things. Could I be seeing the hidden structure of what’s all around us at some beyond-microscopic level?

“It is indeed possible to see things at the quantum level of the photon,” Dr. Bushell explained to me, noting cutting-edge biological research on the human retina that proved humans could detect light at its quantum-mechanical limits, something no artificial detection device could surpass. He cited the work of Princeton biophysicist William Bialek.

“Our eyes are actually that subtle, but we don’t all have access to it at a conscious level. Adept meditators report some of the things you are seeing, so it may be tied to meditation somehow.” Dr. Bushell referred me to scientific papers backing up what he told me, and he himself had published papers connecting this amazing discovery to things advanced meditators said about what they saw in darkened environments. As far back as 1998, University of Washington professor Fred Rieke and Stanford neurobiologist Denis Baylor had written, in
Reviews of Modern Physics,
that our eyes were “nearly perfect photon counters.”

This made me wonder: if the human eye is equipped to see at the quantum level, why doesn’t everybody see what I see? I went back to brain science to look for answers. Our brains are very, very busy—each one processing millions of bits of visual information with each passing second. Experts have long believed that the brain filters out the vast majority of this incoming raw data. Did this mean that other people’s eyes were receiving the same visual input mine did, but their brains were just weeding it out like some sort of visual spam? It made me wish I could tell people how to switch off the brain’s filter so they could see what I see, because it definitely isn’t spam.

The more I talked with Dr. Bushell, the more I thought that meditation might be one way for people to remove those filters. According to Bushell’s extensive research, people who meditate regularly may be able to enhance the way their visual systems work, which might allow them to see things in nature that are hidden from nonmeditators. I had been seeing the hidden fabric of the world in all those geometric shapes already; Dr. Bushell explained that meditation might have something to do with the sudden blossoming of my synesthesia from two dimensions to three.

The medical anthropologist believed synesthetes had extraordinary doorways to perception and said that even the great Japanese Zen master Dōgen had written of synesthesia being present at enlightenment. Dr. Bushell had told Maureen in a previous interview, “Synesthesia may not only be associated with the highest spiritual states, it may be
necessary
for them.” I had never really thought about the concept of enlightenment before, but the more I learned about it, the more what Dr. Bushell was saying made sense to me. Some of the terms I came across in my research on enlightenment were
awakening, self-awareness,
and
understanding the connectedness of everything.
I could see how synesthetes, with their blended senses, might be more in tune with these things.

BOOK: Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel
6.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Ground Zero by Stickland, Rain
The Secret Servant by Daniel Silva
Among the Shrouded by Amalie Jahn
Pussycat Death Squad by Holcomb, Roslyn Hardy
Solomon's Sieve by Danann, Victoria
Blake (Season One: The Ninth Inning #2) by Lindsay Paige, Mary Smith
Air Kisses by Zoe Foster
Theophilus North by Thornton Wilder