Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel (26 page)

As comical as this fräulein could be, I learned she had a very sensitive, philosophical side as well. For example, she noted that the visual imagery of young synesthetes in her care was richer than that of adults—perhaps owing to childhood imagination. She would love for researchers to look into this further and develop teaching models around it. Alexandra didn’t learn that what she had was called synesthesia until 2006, when she read an article in which a person described a 5 as yellow. She herself saw 5 as red. She also had colored letters, weekdays, months, music, sounds, and smells. She called me tenderhearted and said that I stood out even among the wonderful, open members of the U.S. delegation of synesthetes at the conference. I was touched when she told me she was moved by both the complexity of my mathematics and the way I described my mugging and injury. “Together, we are all like different musical instruments in the same orchestra to my mind,” she exclaimed. “Jason, you are the trumpet!”

The American artist and synesthete Carrie C. Firman was well known and respected in the community for her work, so I was really happy to meet her. One outstanding piece, titled “Sympathy Pains,” she’d created was a trench coat she fitted with LED lights that glowed in the colors she actually saw around her body in response to pain. Carrie, who made some of the most beautiful and realistic renderings of what synesthetic photisms look like in her photographic series
That Which Cannot Be Said with Words
(which was displayed in the conference’s art gallery), suffered chronic pain from an illness and for every hurt she felt on her body, she saw a color out in the space around her. She made a jacket fitted with bags of rice to indicate the discomfort and awkwardness of her own painful movements and wore the jacket when she exhibited her art sometimes, but unfortunately she didn’t bring it to Stockholm, so I’ve only seen pictures of her wearing it. I really admired and related to Carrie. We both had had to work through chronic pain. And we both worked diligently to record what we see through art.

Israeli synesthete and psychotherapist Naama Kostiner and I began to develop a meaningful friendship early on. She talked about integrating holistic techniques, including color therapy, into modern-day psychotherapy. I found her very bright and open.

I shared some highlights of my life story with her behind the scenes and she provided wonderful insights.

Whenever we spoke, I became more relaxed. After noticing my difficulty sitting outside on public benches or riding the metro back to the hotel, she asked if I would be more comfortable sitting outside in nature.

“Sure, if it’s a green meadow or under a nice tree, where people don’t tend to pass and contaminate the place, I’d love to.” I also told her that I had no problem touching my wife, Elena, someone I love and trust completely.

When I said this, a look of realization dawned on her face. After thinking for a moment, Naama said, “Jason, I think your greatest fear is of people and not of open spaces or germs. The night of the mugging, you were intentionally hurt by people and then your friends didn’t help. Of course this made you question people’s moral character and compassion, and you developed a distrust of humankind. This explains your willingness to explore ‘untouched’ or ‘undamaged’ nature and be intimate with your wife, the one person you truly trust in the world. Washing your hands seems like a ritual, cleansing yourself from ‘evil, contaminated’ society.”

I told Naama that I thought there might be truth to her theory. I later demonstrated my trust in her by giving her a hug.

It was good to finally meet Dr. Brogaard, or Brit, as she asked me to call her, with whom I would co-present in a Q-and-A format at Aula Magna and in a workshop prior to that. We would then travel on to Helsinki. The Copenhagen-born researcher was quite at home in Scandinavia and had lots of experience presenting at other conferences. We practiced our presentation many times before the big moment—having Brit ask me questions to prompt portions of my story helped us fit everything into the twenty-minute time slot, as I’m prone to go on and on about the things I’m passionate about.

That evening, our rainbow tribe walked off together, several members chattering on about their respective colors for numbers and letters, their shapes for time, and how they feel music. Alexandra, the singing instructor, saw the look of wonder and excitement on my face, whipped out her shadow-puppet hand, and, in an attempt at a police dispatcher’s voice, said, “Spotted walking south in Stockholm: the Synesthesia Gang. Armed with many shapes in the air around them. Approach cautiously.
Very dangerous!
” I laughed a deep belly laugh and the private joke persisted long after Stockholm. There are even Synesthesia Gang T-shirts now. She later told Maureen she liked me a lot and loved my silvery-gray voice in particular.

Over dinner, my new friends talked about Dr. Cytowic, the neurology professor and pioneer in modern synesthesia research I had read about when I first started learning about this. The group was so reverent, they spoke almost in whispers when they talked about him. He believed that synesthesia might be going on in all of us, but only a small percentage got a conscious bleed that resulted in the kind of imagery seen by synesthetes.

In a 1995 paper for the journal
Psyche,
Dr. Cytowic explained this idea by comparing synesthetic perception to a TV transmission. What we see on the TV screen is the end result of a broadcast, and most people are able to see only this final product. But what if someone could intercept the broadcast before it ever reached the TV screen? The transmission might be in a different, perhaps more raw form. He suggested that this might be how synesthetes view things. This made me think of those images I’ve seen of a television director looking at dozens of monitors and choosing which feeds will end up on a news broadcast. Maybe synesthetes are like those directors, seeing more than one feed at a time.

I also learned over dinner how synesthetic images often act as mnemonic devices. The group discussed Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky, a Russian journalist who became known as a memory whiz. For decades, Russian neuropsychologist and memory researcher Alexander Luria studied the young man, eventually writing a book about him, published in English in 1968, called
The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory
. At one point, Dr. Luria claimed that S., as he referred to his subject, “probably possesses the strongest memory of all men.” For example, he could look at extensive lists of numbers for mere moments and then repeat them all—even in reverse—and he could memorize lengthy passages of famous literary works in foreign languages even though he didn’t speak those languages.

In his efforts to determine how Shereshevsky was able to perform such incredible feats of memory, Luria discovered that he had a sort of all-encompassing synesthesia involving all five senses. The stimulation of one sense might cause reactions in a number of the others. For example, if he heard a musical note, he might see a color, feel a touch, or taste something. He also personified numbers—the number 1 was a proud, well-built man; the number 2 was a high-spirited woman; and so on—which helped him remember series of numbers quite readily. I could relate to that. I had found that I could remember phone numbers much more easily now—it must have to do with the associated shapes for the numbers, which underscore them somehow.

The group talked about how these extrasensory responses acted as mnemonics for all of us as they did for Shereshevsky. We spent a while discussing things that had become indelible in our minds because of the extra associations. Maureen told the story of how in grade school, she was stuck on a test question about when the United States had entered World War I. “I couldn’t remember the year, but I knew it was ebony-umber-ebony-scarlet, so I worked backwards to 1914.”

I contributed that my hero Daniel Tammet, the synesthete and savant, wrote in his memoir
Born on a Blue Day
that he saw numbers not only as shapes and colors but also as textures and motions. Even more interesting was the fact that for him, numbers had their own personalities—some were loud (5), some were shy (4), some were small (6), some were big (23), some were ugly (289), and some were beautiful (333). Considering that this was how Tammet perceived numbers, it’s not surprising that he had an emotional response to them. My favorite thing about Tammet, though, was that, like me, he was fascinated by the number pi, so much so that he devoted an entire chapter of his memoir to it. I am in awe of the fact that in March 2004, he recited pi from memory and got to 22,514 digits in just five hours and nine minutes—a European record!

We walked back to the hotel, and though I was intent on having a restful night, I found myself overstimulated and worried about the fact that I was sharing the space with a roommate. I slathered antibacterial lotion over my whole body before putting on my pajamas and lying down for a fitful night, despite the heroic efforts of my bunkmate, Paul.

The next day arrived too soon, although I couldn’t help but find the nerves exhilarating. It reminded me of when I’d taken the stage as Oliver or jumped out of planes. Paul and I went to Aula Magna and walked onstage to get a sense of it before the actual presentation. He even did a handstand when no one was looking so that he could say he did. Laughing at that released a lot of tension for me.

As I was about to walk out onto the stage for my debut, a spotlight shone in my eyes, and its rays fanned out over the wooden relief work of the theater in a perfect, demarcated polygon. I whispered, “Look, Maureen, it’s pi.” She looked up, nodded, and broke into a wide smile. “Good luck, Jason,” she whispered back. “You can do this!”

Finally in front of an audience of academics, with no futons to ring up at the end of the conversation, I was about to launch my career as a theorist. People fumbled with papers and talked a little, and then I began. I opened with the story of my mugging a decade ago. The audience grew silent. I noticed a number of them nodding at me, offering encouragement. The rest of the panel members on the stage were also nodding. I
can
do this!

The PowerPoint then opened to my drawings as I explained everything from pi onward, guided by Brit’s questions. People started to wander into the talk—some just stood in the doorways and aisles. I felt like I’d crossed a huge finish line when people applauded at the end and I made my way back to my seat. Life would be different from now on, of that I was sure.

I got terrific feedback about my participation at the conference and discovered that many people were talking about me. Nick Day, the filmmaker I spoke to at length the first night of the conference, said, “Jason’s case is extremely rare, if not unique . . . If our world presents a smooth and contiguous surface, Jason’s reveals the deeper substructure of geometric forms and patterns, of pixels and grids and lattices . . .”

Nick also talked about how I fit into the ongoing exploration of consciousness—whether it is merely a byproduct of brain activity, as most traditional scientists believe, or whether it is more fundamental than that, as some esoteric theorists suggest. He thought that either theory could explain my situation. I was honored to think that a few of these amazing scientists might actually look to me as some sort of living proof of their complex theories about the most essential questions about the mind.

Even the conference director, Dr. Hameroff, had something to say about me after the meeting: “Synesthetic minds plumb deeper order, finer scales of consciousness. Jason Padgett’s savant synesthesia suggests the mind, reality and the universe are fractal-like, and self-similar.” Yes! Hearing this from such an important person reinforced my belief that the visions I was seeing were perhaps the very fabric of the universe.

I was both exhilarated by my debut in Stockholm and nervous about what would be next. What would the tests in Helsinki show about my mind? There was no turning back from the truth now.

Chapter Sixteen

I
LEFT STOCKHOLM ON
May 8 and boarded a plane for another Scandinavian hub of consciousness: Helsinki, Finland. Brit, who had been my co-presenter at the conference, arranged with a team of neuroscientists to put me through my paces at Aalto University. While we could have done the tests in America, Brit had an association with the Scandinavian lab, and it was expedient to do it while we were all together in Europe. The tall, blond Danish philosopher and scientist and I were so engaged in conversation on the plane that we walked right through customs without our luggage and had to circle back.

I was nervous about being in a new place. Some posttraumatic stress struck as I was out and about in Helsinki, and I felt afraid of strangers. I was also prickly about taking the tests and discovering the truth, which would be revealed through brain scans done by high-tech machines. Would it confirm what I suspected? Or would the scientists see something terribly wrong when they finally got a glimpse of my gray matter?

Brit took the time to explain how important it was for others to understand what I experienced. “No one knows exactly how people with savant syndrome are able to do the amazing things they do,” she wrote to me and Maureen. “But everyone agrees that we won’t have a good picture of how the human brain functions until we know how they do it.”

One of Brit’s hypotheses was that people with savant syndrome had conscious access to parts of the brain that normal people didn’t. She explained that the brain did many calculations throughout the day—think of something as simple as reaching for a computer mouse and moving it around. While we can feel our movements, most people don’t have access to the inner calculations their brains are performing to make the movement possible. She said that these calculations take place in the dorsal stream, also referred to as the where/how pathway, which runs from the visual cortex at the back of the head upward through the parietal cortex near the top of the head. Most people have access to the output only, not the calculations. “But people with savant syndrome of a mathematical kind apparently are able to use these areas of the brain to calculate amazing things,” she explained. She hypothesized that savants gained conscious access to the process through synesthetic visualizations. The “zombie calculations” that take place in hidden areas of the brain are translated into pictures, colors, and shapes, she said. This made a lot of sense to me, since I saw pictures for my math constantly. “Synesthesia is a kind of gateway into the hidden areas of our brains,” she said.