A serious injury that led to extraordinary abilities was experienced by a humble, nondescript furniture salesman in Tacoma Washington named Jason Padgett. One night in 2002, Padgett went out drinking at a bar and as he was leaving to go home he was jumped and severely beaten by two muggers, getting kicked repeatedly in the head and body and suffering a concussion and ruptured kidney in the process.
In the following days he realized that his vision was off somehow, and that everything he looked at seemed to be infused with various strange geometric shapes and lines which he at first did not understand, making the world pixilated in a sense. He began drawing and painting what he was seeing, and it was only later that someone realized that these were not just random designs, but rather complex mathematical formulas in visual geometric form, called fractals.
He was essentially seeing the geometric forms of everything through the lens of mathematical formulas, visualizing the world in the myriad wondrous shapes that these created.
This is all especially impressive as Padgett, who was never any good at math and had never really like studying at all, was creating fractals that were very precise, meaning that his brain was intuitively working out incredibly sophisticated mathematical formulas and translating those to the images he saw everywhere he went.
Also rather odd is that he was able to accurately render these geometric patterns by hand, something that typically requires much formal training and special tools to pull off, and Padgett is the only known person who can do this solely by hand and without ever having studied it in his life. These were things beyond even the ability of the most masterful mathematicians, yet he was able to do it without even thinking about it.
Padget would later go on to seriously study mathematics and number theory, which he of course excels at, and he has written a book of his strange experiences called Struck by Genius (2014).
Scientists who are interested in just how Padgett gained these remarkable abilities have scanned his brain and performed an experiment to see what was going on in there. Padgett was hooked up and then shown a series of math formulas, some of which were real and some of which were nonsensical.
When the real formulas came up, the left hemisphere of his brain showed a dramatic increase in activity, completely lighting up, particularly in an area called the “left parietal cortex,” which typically brings together the myriad information pouring in from the different senses, as well as other parts of the brain responsible for visual memory, emotion, planning, and attention. The fake formulas created no such response.
