What Is the First Thing That Gilgamesh Asks Enkidu About When He Sees Him Again in the Underworld
The violent assault that turned a man into a maths genius
Daybed salesman Jason Padgett cared little about anything across partying and chasing girls, and so ane fateful night changed him forever.
BBC Future has brought you in-depth and rigorous stories to assistance you navigate the current pandemic, simply we know that's non all you want to read. So now we're dedicating a series to assistance y'all escape. We'll be revisiting our most popular features from the last three years in our Lockdown Longreads .
You'll find everything from the story about the earth's greatest space mission to the truth well-nigh whether our cats really love us, the epic chase to bring illegal fishermen to justice and the small-scale team which brings long-buried World State of war 2 tanks dorsum to life. What you won't discover is whatever reference to, well, y'all-know-what. Enjoy.
Jason Padgett sees maths everywhere. Even something as ordinary as brushing his teeth is governed past mathematics – he turns the tap on and dips his toothbrush into the water 16 times.
"I don't know why I like perfect squares," he says. "It's not just a perfect foursquare, it's two to the power of four or four squared simply I simply like perfect squares… I automatically practice that stuff with everything."
Padgett is so obsessed with maths and understands such circuitous concepts, he's been chosen a genius. He certainly has a rare talent for drawing repeating geometric patterns – known as fractals – by hand.
Yous might also similar:
• Is information technology right to use Nazi science?
• The maths problem that could bring the world to a halt
• What it'due south like during a chemical attack
Simply the sometime daybed salesman from Alaska hasn't always had a manner with numbers. Only nether 17 years ago he was living a very different life in Tacoma, Washington.
"I was very shallow," he laughs. "Life rotated around girls, partying, drinking, waking upward with a hangover and then going out and chasing girls and going out to bars again."
Maths wasn't on his radar whatsoever.
"I used to say 'math is stupid, how can yous use that in the real world'? And I thought that was like a smart argument. I really believed it."
Only on the night of Friday xiii September 2002 everything changed. (Read more virtually why some people get sudden geniuses).
While out with friends, Padgett was attacked and robbed past 2 men outside a karaoke bar. They took his already torn leather jacket.
Padgett cared little about maths, instead focusing on having fun before the set on that inverse the mode his brain worked (Credit: Jason Padgett)
"I heard every bit much as felt this deep, low-pitched thud equally the first guy ran upwards behind me and smashed me in the back of the head," he recalls. "And I saw this puff of white light just like someone took a picture. The side by side thing I knew I was on my knees and everything was spinning and I didn't know where I was or how I got there."
Padgett staggered to a infirmary across the street where he was told he had concussion and a bleeding kidney thanks to a punch to the gut. "They gave me a shot of pain medication and sent me dwelling house," he remembers.
Only once home, Padgett's behaviour changed quickly and dramatically. He had sustained a traumatic encephalon injury, which tin can bring on obsessive compulsive disorder - OCD. In Jason's case, he became increasingly afraid of the outside globe and would just leave his house to stock up on food.
"I just retrieve nailing blankets and towels over all the windows in the business firm… I remember actually using this spray foam and gluing the front end door close."
The OCD had made Padgett irrationally afraid of germs, which had a knock-on effect on his daughter who would come to stay with him amidst custody negotiations with his ex-partner.
"When she would come over I would obsessively launder my hands and make clean," he says. "The very first thing I would want to do is get her shoes off, go her into clean clothes, wash her hands."
Merely while Padgett was experiencing all these negative consequences from his assail, something incredible was happening too. The way Jason was seeing things changed.
Following the violent assault, Padgett withdrew from the outside world and developed obsessive behaviours (Credit: Getty)
"Everything that was curved looked similar information technology was slightly pixelated," he explains. "Water coming down the drain didn't look like it was a shine, flowing thing anymore, it looked like these piffling tangent lines."
The same matter happened with clouds, sunlight streaming between trees and puddles. To Padgett, the globe essentially looked similar a retro video game. Seeing such a radically different view of his surroundings evoked conflicting emotions in Padgett. "I was surprised…confused. It was beautiful merely it was also scary at the same time."
Because of these visions, Padgett began to think well-nigh huge questions in relation to mathematics and physics. Given his hermit-similar existence at that time, the internet became a valuable source of information to him as he read extensively about mathematics online.
He stumbled across a webpage about fractals which struck a chord with him. Information technology'due south a difficult mathematical concept which, put at its about bones, can be likened to a snowflake. When you zoom in, you will see it's made up of smaller snowflakes connected together, zoom in again and those snowflakes are made of smaller snowflakes, and then on until infinity.
Padgett was fascinated by this concept simply didn't yet accept the words to describe it until one day his daughter asked him how the TV worked.
Since the attack Padgett has been able to draw repeating geometric patterns known every bit fractals by paw (Credit: Jason Padgett)
"When you're looking at a Television set screen and y'all see a circle it's really not a circumvolve," he says. "It's fabricated with rectangles or squares and, if you look close, the edge of the circle is actually a zig zag. You can take those pixels and cutting them in one-half and cut them in half and yous become closer and closer to a perfect circumvolve merely you lot never actually reach one because you can continue cutting the pixels in one-half forever, then the resolution gets better but you never have a perfect circle."
Padgett felt compelled to explore this intriguing concept further. So, he began to draw. And he kept drawing.
"I had literally a thousand or more than drawings of circles, fractals, every shape that I could manage to draw. It was the just mode I could manage to communicate finer what I was seeing."
Padgett believed his drawings "held the key to the universe" and were so of import that he needed to take them everywhere with him.
While on a rare trip out one day, he was approached by a man who had noticed Padgett with his drawings and told him they looked mathematical.
Jason Padgett had been a futon salesman before the violent attack that changed his life (Credit: Jason Padgett)
"I'm trying to describe the discrete structure of space fourth dimension based on Planck length (a tiny unit of measurement adult by physicist Max Planck) and breakthrough black holes," Padgett told him. Information technology turned out the man was a physicist and recognised the high-level mathematics Padgett was drawing. He urged him to take a maths course, which led Padgett to enrol in a community college, where he began to learn the linguistic communication he needed to draw his obsession.
Afterwards three and a half years of living similar a virtual hermit, going to school inverse everything for Padgett. He started to get psychological assist for his OCD and even met the woman who would go his wife.
Just why was he seeing things in such a foreign and different style? Why was his world now comprised of geometric shapes and graphs?
Poetically, it was television that again provided him with a clue. Padgett saw a human, a then-called savant, who had boggling numerical abilities and talked almost what numbers looked like to him.
A physicist who recognised the drawings that Padgett was producing set him on a new path by urging him to study mathematics (Credit: Jason Padgett)
"I would always describe that math was shapes not numbers and that was the first fourth dimension I'd heard everyone but me talk almost what numbers looked similar," says Padgett.
He scoured the internet for more information and came across Berit Brogaard, a cognitive neuroscientist at present at the University of Miami. The pair spent hours talking on the phone and from these conversations, Brogaard hypothesised that Padgett had synaesthesia – substantially a cross-wiring of the brain in which the senses become mixed upwardly. (Observe out more than about synaesthesia — and whether it can exist learnt).
Information technology is estimated to effect only effectually 4% of the population. Some synesthetes might meet certain colours when they hear music or aroma something that's not in that location when feeling a particular emotion.
The condition is caused by connections between parts of the brain that are not in that location in other people. You tin can exist born this way or some type of trauma, an injury, a stroke, an allergic reaction, tin can change the brain.
Brogaard believes the encephalon injury Padgett sustained acquired him to develop a form of synaesthesia where sure things triggered visions of mathematical formulas or geometric shapes, either in his mind or projected in front of him. She also hypothesised that synaesthesia fabricated Padgett an caused savant.
"Most of u.s.a. don't have that kind of insight because we don't visualise mathematical formulas," says Brogaard.
Padgett developed a form of synaesthesia that gave him visions of mathematical formulas (Credit: Alamy)
To test these ideas, Brogaard brought Padgett to the Brain Research Unit of Aalto Academy in Helsinki, where he underwent a series of brain scans.
While in the MRI scanner, hundreds of equations, including fake ones, flashed on a screen in front of Padgett's eyes. The researchers then watched which parts of his brain lit upwards in response.
"They establish that I had access to parts of the brain that we don't have conscious access to and also the visual cortex was working in conjunction with the part of the brain that does mathematics, which obviously makes sense," says Padgett.
Brogaard's hypotheses turned out to exist true. Padgett was formally diagnosed with acquired savant syndrome and a form of synaesthesia. Finally, he had answers.
Since his diagnosis, Padgett has published a volume about his experience chosen Struck past Genius, he's toured the earth telling people his story and educating them most maths. He is aiming to help others who have had unique or rare/interesting lives by getting their stories published or made into movies. He even sells his drawings of fractals.
The ii men who attacked him that fateful September dark were never convicted despite Padgett identifying them and pressing charges.
His unique way of seeing the earth has allowed Padgett to grapple with some of the most complex mathematical issues (Credit: Jason Padgett)
Years later, yet, one of the men, Brady Simmons, wrote to Padgett to apologise while he was undergoing treatment for prescription drug addiction following a suicide attempt. In a sense, two lives were inverse in the years that followed the attack.
"I'grand a completely different person," says Simmons. "When I expect back the abysmal person that I was in the past, I just don't encounter how I existed on that level."
Padgett too feels like he is a different person than he was before.
"I come across it [beauty] everywhere," he says. He is mesmerised by uncomplicated things that most people don't even notice such as raindrops falling on a puddle.
Through Padgett's optics, the puddle is transformed into complex rippling patterns, overlapping and forming shapes like stars or snowflakes. And he wants everyone else to see what he sees.
"Yous should be walking around in absolute amazement at all times that reality fifty-fifty exists," he says. "I'm having this mathematical awakening and all around us is absolute magic or near equally shut equally you tin can go to magic."
--
Join ane one thousand thousand Future fans by liking us on Facebook , or follow u.s. on Twitter or Instagram .
If you lot liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter , chosen "The Essential Listing". A handpicked option of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Fri.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190411-the-violent-attack-that-turned-a-man-into-a-maths-genius
0 Response to "What Is the First Thing That Gilgamesh Asks Enkidu About When He Sees Him Again in the Underworld"
Post a Comment