Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel (23 page)

When I told Dr. Bushell about the pain relief I’d experienced after meditating, he wasn’t surprised at all. In fact, he told me that when it comes to relieving pain, scientific evidence shows that meditation and hypnosis can be just as effective as opioids—the most powerful pharmacological treatment. He said that brain-imaging studies showed how it works. One study that was especially encouraging to me was a joint effort between the University of California, Irvine, and the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention. They used fMRI brain scans to test the response to pain in twelve long-term meditators and twelve nonmeditators. Compared to the nonmeditators, the meditators showed up to 50 percent less activity in areas of the brain associated with pain response. But what was really cool was that after the nonmeditators spent five months learning how to meditate, their scans showed up to 50 percent reduced activity in the brain’s pain centers compared to their first test.

Equally exciting to me was learning that the practice also reduced symptoms associated with PTSD. One study that appeared in
Military Medicine
found that veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who practiced meditating for just eight weeks reduced their PTSD symptoms by 50 percent. If it was that helpful for Marines returning from war zones, then it just might be helpful for me too.

To get the maximum benefit from meditation, however, I needed to learn how to relax and clear my mind, because I couldn’t stop the images I saw, even with my eyes closed. What a surprise to hear Dr. Bushell say that the stereotypical notion of meditation as a clearing of the mind or a lack of thought isn’t the only way to do it. Apparently, some people practice types of meditation specifically designed to develop mental imagery. I was glad I didn’t have to worry that I always needed to see a black screen when I closed my eyes for my meditation to be effective.

From everything I had told Dr. Bushell, he said he thought that something extraordinary was going on with my skill at concentrating, something he referred to as yogic ability. He said that savants have an enormous ability to focus, and he thought that my success at self-regulating my blood pressure, heart rate, and skin temperature signaled a high aptitude for meditation. I had to agree. I’d never before been able to sit still and ponder things. And what about the four years I’d spent holed up in my home just thinking?

He told me that even Einstein and Newton practiced this sort of isolation, meditating on a problem. I couldn’t believe that my behavior mirrored that of my scientific heroes, not to mention that of some of the top meditators of the world. Talking with Dr. Bushell confirmed for me I was on the right path with this new practice in my life.

In Stockholm I got to meet Dr. Bushell in person as well as his collaborator Neil Theise, a physician, stem-cell researcher, synesthete, and Zen student for twenty-five years. Their double-act presentation for Maureen’s synesthesia workshop at the consciousness meeting and the discussions in the group that followed expanded on many of these themes of meditation and consciousness. I could hardly wait to learn more about how it all might apply to me.

I would later get to talk with Dr. Theise about how I fit into the wider theme of the conference: that it was about not only biology but also consciousness and its various forms. He talked to me about the self-organizing nature of the universe, the idea that the world self-assembles from the smallest Planck scale all the way up through the everyday world to the vast, cosmic scale. He said that according to long-accepted theories, the smallest things—whether they were strings or particles or something else—were thought to bubble into existence out of a so-called quantum foam. We can thank Nobel Prize–winning physicist John Archibald Wheeler for this concept of a sort of bubbling foam of matter, antimatter, and space-time itself. The geometry at this level, as Dr. Theise pointed out, is distorted, and there are no smooth edges.

No smooth edges? Not even at the tiniest level? Upon learning this, I could hardly contain my excitement. In my mind, this validated not only my belief that fractal geometry and its ability to measure roughness is profoundly important but also my belief that a circle has no smooth curvature when viewed at the smallest scale.

Dr. Theise went on to say that most of this infinitesimally small stuff immediately self-destructs and vanishes, but some of it interacts to “self-assemble into subatomic particles and then into atoms, into molecules, all the way on up to form our bodies, stars and planets, galaxies.” Once again, this made me think of all the fractals I see throughout the universe, and I felt like I must have been on to something when I thought that everything and everyone is a reflection of the same repetitive structure.

But then the stem-cell researcher ventured into philosophical territory that I hadn’t even begun to consider. If everything is self-assembling from quantum foam that comes from nothing, “then what is this nothing out of which everything arises?” he asked. Dr. Theise told me how one perspective, based equally on contemporary Western philosophy and first-person reports from Dr. Bushell’s adept meditators, proposes that this nothingness is the mind itself—and that
everything
is mind.

Up until this point in my research into my condition, I had been learning how brain chemistry determines what happens in our minds. What Dr. Theise was saying flipped that around, implying that the mind cannot be explained by just looking at the brain, but rather that the mind itself may be fundamental—that the physical universe may arise from the mind.

In addition to introducing me to a new way to look at the mind, Dr. Theise also pointed me to a different theory on synesthesia. Dr. Theise himself has the spatial-sequence form of synesthesia, seeing his time units out in space around him. So far, I had found lots of research claiming that synesthesia develops when wires in the brain get crossed. But Dr. Theise suggested that it might go deeper than that. In his view, the mind or consciousness underlies all of existence, and the brain is merely filtering out everything that isn’t necessary for daily functioning. He likened it to the way you can tune in to a specific radio station. There are millions of radio signals out there, but the radio is able to filter through them all to zero in on the one you want to hear. “When a radio can’t be tuned,” he said, “it’s not actually transmitting too little information, it’s transmitting
too much
information. The overlapping, multiple signals collide in our ears. Similarly, in the deeper mind accessed by the meditator, in the mind that is as yet unfiltered by the brain for everyday functioning, there is no separation of one sense or another.”

One thing Dr. Theise told me that really surprised me was that some people think that all babies are synesthetic and that this innate blending of the senses is filtered out as the brain develops. This made me think of some articles I had come across in my research showing that, compared to adults, two- and three-year-olds have twice as many connections, called synapses, in the brain. Scientists say that these extra connections get weeded out through childhood and adolescence. So maybe it was true. Maybe we are all born synesthetes, but most of us lose the gift as our brains develop.

Dr. Theise then described his own experiences with meditation with a tidbit from left field that brought me back to Newton and Einstein: “Without exception, all my best research ideas—the kind that I
know
are right even before I confirm them experimentally—have come to me while I was meditating.”

Although my conversations with Dr. Bushell and Dr. Theise provided a lot of insight, I felt like I had more questions than ever. The more I learned, the more I realized how much I didn’t know. In my quest to discover what was happening in my brain and how I fit into the world at large, I was beginning to think that I might have to open my mind to a variety of different theories about how the universe really works.

Word was starting to get around about me within this community. Even a top Tibetan lama being studied at New York University by Dr. Bushell and the director of the contemplative Neuroscience Lab at NYU, Zoran Josipovic, had heard of me. A political refugee who had apparently cured his own gangrene by using a form of meditation known as
tsa lung,
he was being examined in brain-scan machines while meditating. Phakyab Rinpoche is believed to be a living master of the
tsa lung
discipline. Its adherents visualize moving a purifying air through the channels of the body to cleanse and heal.

Rinpoche sent a message to me and said that had I not suffered through the attack and all the subsequent pain involved, I might never have achieved the ability to meditate so effectively. And I certainly might not have the empathy for others that I now had.

“Sickness is bad, but it made you focus and be strong. If something negative hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t have these positives. It is a gift.”

He suggested that when I meditated I shouldn’t just close my eyes. Rather, he wanted me to concentrate and meditate on a purifying wind flowing through all the channels of my body, clearing out disease. In addition, I might imagine a single pebble being dropped in a puddle and radiating out to cleanse my body from within.

I was very appreciative that this lama had taken an interest in me. He had been through excruciating pain like me and had used the power of his own mind to heal himself. It helped me to forge on. And when I experienced new pain or tremors, I found myself imagining the wind or the pebble. It continues to be helpful to me and lessens my pain and anxiety.

Another aspect of the pain-management clinic that I was learning to enjoy was the gym. I hadn’t worked out for years but I was now lifting weights and using the treadmill available at the center. A big hurdle for me was getting past the idea that if I did something that hurt, like lifting weights, I was further damaging myself. The therapists explained that this was a common misconception among people who’ve been badly injured. Avoiding weight-lifting might lead to muscle atrophy, bone-density loss, and a lack of conditioning, and that was what would really hurt me in the long run, they said.

Though I was making great progress in the clinic’s program, the group-therapy sessions remained a challenge. Before the sessions, I worried about how hard it would be for me and the other participants to reveal the details of our private lives. One day, I arrived at eight o’clock to do my morning stretches before the meeting, and I was already starting to feel anxious. I knew it was going to be a very emotional day for all of us, delving into our difficult histories and speaking publicly about them.

The group convened, and our leader encouraged us to share what was on our minds. The patients began to tell their stories, one by one. One man talked about how exhausted he was living with chronic pain and how it distracted him from his life goals, and I felt myself physically tense up because I so related to him. He added that the sexist myth that men should always be strong and able made him feel doubly bad. I realized I was beginning to feel both his discomfort and my own as I listened.

Then a hard-looking young woman named Sunny began to speak. I had learned from our previous conversations that she used to be in a gang but had left that life behind. Just as she was getting her life back together, she suffered a back injury.

“I’ve been a tough, strong girl my whole life,” she said. “But now it’s so bad having people just look at me and unable to see what’s wrong with me and still expecting me to work like before. . . . People are treating me like I’m a wimp or lazy and don’t want to work. They say, ‘Oh, everyone gets a sore back once in a while.’”

I didn’t realize it, but tears were running down my face as she said this. I felt sorry for her and was reminded of my own situation with family, friends, and colleagues who still expected me to lift heavy things at the store all day long as I had for years and who treated me like I was complaining for no reason. Most of all, I just thought of my chronic pain and whether I would have to live this way for the rest of my life.

I looked up at my instructor and realized she was staring at me. Then I felt the moisture on my face. I pointed to the door, asking to leave. She nodded.

I went across the hall to an empty office, sat in a chair, and thought about Sunny. She had been kind to me earlier, listening to my whole life story. Tough as she was, she hugged me at the time and said, “I ain’t never known nobody like you before, Jason.” I felt bad for her right now, and bad for the other people who spoke. And then I realized how much I’d been suffering for years and years. I started really bawling, just howling. I hadn’t cried that hard since my son died. And then I remembered him and I let out a wail.

I couldn’t stop. All the tears I had not shed about the mugging poured out of me. So did the anger and sadness over my brother’s and stepfather’s deaths. I realized I’d never properly mourned any of these losses. Now they were all hitting me simultaneously in a tsunami of pain.

My body was shaking and I felt like I needed to run but I didn’t know where I should go. I could barely catch my breath as the now silent sobbing came in waves and my lungs heaved. My whole body alternately lurched and cramped. I could barely sit up in the chair.

A doctor came in and tried to comfort me but I was inconsolable. I couldn’t speak when she asked me what was wrong. I just shook my head vigorously to indicate I couldn’t even talk. She’d been kind to me in the past and had asked about my drawings.

I barely noticed that she’d walked across the room to the windows. Then I heard her say:

“Jason, how many windows can you count on that building facade across the street?”

I looked up.

With that, I took a big gulp of air as though I’d just surfaced from an ocean dive.

“There are twelve.”

“Great,” she said. “How many panes are there in each window?”

My shoulders were still heaving uncontrollably but I counted them and saw there were eight in each window and I managed to say that aloud too.