Meet the Accidental Genius

[Music] the first several months is kind of a blur I remember obsessing over like is something wrong with my brain you know I probably killed those guys in my head you know a million times but at the same time it was just beautiful now I for sure see it as a gift I a great comfort knowing that the universe is math everything literally is math in the 90s it was the booming times for futons you could own a futon store and do really really well the economy was doing well and the margins were good it was the Golden Age of futons in the 90s for sure I was a completely different person back then I worked out six to seven days a week and I had a spike tear on top and a mullet and literally everything revolved around partying and chasing girls and goofing off I had been to this little karaoke bar before that night I went there went up singing a song had a coke and left as I walked outside two guys there walking behind one of them just smashed me right in the back of the head for a moment I didn't know where I was I got where I was and everything was spinning and I was getting kicked in the face and punched I remember this feeling of I am alone nobody's gonna help after that attack I went to the hospital they diagnosed me with like a concussion the bleeding kidney and sent me home the next morning everything was different OCD came on instantly I remember washing my hands for some reason and then drying my hands them thinking wait a second that towel was dirty washing my hands again and getting a clean towel then realizing wait a second I didn't clean the knob so then cleaning that before I knew it I had washed my hands like 20 times in less than half an hour I knew it was silly but I still felt this compulsion to do it I was really depressed I didn't want to be out in public remember hammering like three layers of blankets over every single window in my house so that not a beam of light would come in I would go out like to get groceries and I would only leave at nighttime because there was fewer people and I remember sleeping almost for three days and waking up and just trying to make myself go back to sleep [Music] we have this knowledge the brain is capable of calculating these amazing things and some of those insights that that are not normally insights because we don't have conscious access to them could be the kinds of things that we gain conscious access to in certain cases of brain injury there was an article in 1967 by a psychologist who described a young lad who had been shot in the head and survived and after that he developed some particular mechanical and other spatial skills and it was written up as an acquired savant well I began to research the what we know about the condition to that point I was inundated with with inquiries and new cases so I presently have about 70 cases of acquired salons in Rome from around the world Jon Sarkin is a chiropractor who had a stroke and has become a an artist and has his own gallery now Orlando Serrell was hit in the head by a baseball at age 10 and following that was able to do a calendar calculating which is the ability to tell you what day of the week a particular date will fall on in the past or in the future Alonzo Clements had a severe fall and then he went on to do his marvelous work now as a sculptor when this new ability emerges whatever it is it it's an all-consuming interest and it takes over the person's life so it becomes as much of a force as a gift because they can't turn it off it was a very dark bleak time but at the same time there was this Beauty to the universe and to the way things moved that I had never seen before I remember looking at water going down the drain and being absolutely instantly fascinated with it it looked like these little tangent lines that were rotating and getting tinier as it as it went down the smoothness of the water was gone and then when I would see things on TV or on the wall or anywhere in the world I would notice the exact same shapes all over the place it's literally everywhere one day I left the house and I saw the Sun and I realized that I hadn't seen the Sun it had to have been like three or four months my brain was overstimulated I was noticing everything that I hadn't noticed before [Music] the clouds and water and light bouncing off water raindrops hitting the puddle and watching all the raindrops overlap each other to create these new waves I knew was math and I knew it was all related to pie one day I drew just the basic concept you know like I I sub divided a circle into like eight pieces and then like twelve pieces just to get the idea across as I drew it became very therapeutic it's like the one time that all the stuff that is going on in my head kind of goes away you know I forget about germs I forget about everything and nothing exists but what I'm doing so it was very different having both of these feelings at the same time you know being so depressed but at the same time being so happy about that one aspect of life but at the same time I was also you know doubting myself too what if I'm that guy who thinks I see everything as a portion as pieces of pie and I'm the only one that sees it and it's not real I got a email from Jason Padgett he was wondering am I losing my mind yeah you know am I going crazy when he contacted me I thought that maybe he would fit into a group study on soon as to us soon as he shows a special blending of the senses or streams within one sentence to hear a picture or to see a sound Jason Padgett's synesthesia is unique so the way that he sees the world is in terms of your medical patterns but then he also has those geometrical patterns in response to mathematical formulas so he became his own case study because we thought his condition was very interesting [Music] if my is a kind of brain scan that meshes the amount of oxygen in the blood in different areas of the brain they put me in the machine they would have a little screen in front of me even though I'm in that little tube so we were in a random order showing formulas that would introduce his anesthetic images and then dummy formulas that did not induce synesthesia we saw very left-sided activity on the top of the head which is involved in mathematical activity and some in the frontal areas of the brain Jason isn't acquired on in the mugging there was some brain damage and then there was recruitment of intact cortical tissue elsewhere rewiring to that and then release of this mathematical a dormant potential it was a relief I've worried a lot over whether this was something that would eventually be fatal or could eventually cause you know dementia and all sorts of other problems that we now find are associated with brain injuries what really changed everything was going back to school I still had OCD really badly the first day coming into class I had a suitcase when I had bleach wipes and all the stuff and I cleaned off the entire table and the chairs and my teacher graphed an equation and I said you mean all these equations you can graph into a shape and she goes yes and I go then we are talking about the same thing just in two different ways Jason is one of the most memorable students I have ever had he was seeing these things which exist in the world but he didn't have the mathematical vocabulary to communicate them to other people clearly he could not stop drawing these things because he was so desperate to communicate it to somebody else it gave me an outlet to talk to somebody who knew what they were doing in traditional math sense and it wasn't just going back to school to learn stuff by going back to school it made me come back out into the world within just a few days I was in the cafeteria drawing and that was when I met my wife we started going out which meant I was coming out into the world regularly and I was going to school it broke me out of that depression that gave me something bright to look forward to in life from that point on everything just changed for the better dramatically the brain comes loaded with all sorts of factory-installed software to which most of us don't have access a major question that that faces us with acquired savant syndrome is how can one tap that dormant potential without having a head injury or some kind of central nervous system incident we know what school goes on when people have a brain injury more or less but we could use some kind of simulation maybe but this what it is that sometimes gives rise to savant skills so soon a seizure there's also the possibility of using transcranial magnetic stimulation which is a big magnet that you put on the top of the head so you simulate a lesion in the brain to induce special skills in people who don't have those skills just like religion gives a lot of people solace math does that to me now I for sure see it as a gift absolutely of all these events hadn't happened you know I wouldn't bet my wife wouldn't have my my children now I feel very lucky am I gonna discover some new wonderful thing it is possible but what it looks like the real benefit of this is going to be is my ability to connect I feel I will have a much larger impact by getting more people to go into science and math and or even just understand it on a slightly higher level that will change things in a much greater way than just finding one new theorem [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 14,460,982

Rating: 4.8056688 out of 5

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, really great big stories, CNN Films, Thomas Petersen, Jason Padgett, Tacoma, Washington, beating, violence, brain damage, savant syndrome, trauma, Biography & Profile, Tech & Science, genius, brain, neurology, math, geometry, college, Weird & Fun Knowledge, The Acquired Savant, Accidental Genius, documentary, docs, great big films, chalkboard

Id: 7H6doOmS-eM

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/SlouchyGuy]

Yeah, except he doesn't seem to do anything with this ability now except doing some interviews and making geometric drawings that are sold on the same story

[u/MushroomFungie]

I watched this couple of weeks ago, I still don't get how he is a genius, he just started drawing doodles all day.

[u/[deleted]]

I can not escape this fucking video. No Matter what video I watch it's always in my recommended.

[u/ProjektPat]

This was lame. I kept expecting it to go somewhere but it was just "manager of a mattress store likes to draw geometric shapes now"

[u/smitemight]

Talk about beating sense into a person.

[u/AtoxHurgy]

Damn, after getting my head beaten I just got dumber.

Maybe I should try again

[u/atair9]

I call bullshit on this:

These patterns he draws is best described as Sacred Geometry, which we do since a long time, and while certain similarities show up in physics, e.g. Unified field theory - as far as our brain is concerned, it is just something that shows up when you are on drugs or had a brain injury.

A whole generation of people on mushrooms can attest to that.

My criticism is that while that correlation may be causal, there is no further insight to be gained. Yes, we can see these patterns, yes they may mean something, but that's it. This guy sees them, but that does not help him understand the world better, nor to advance our understanding of it.

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[u/anderbobeau]

When I was two, my mom was sitting with her friend at the wooden coffee table in our living room. One of them did the knock on wood joke and tapped the table with a closed fist. I see this, walk over to the table, say "knock on wood!!!!" and proceed to bash my face into the table using my forehead.

I wish it made me better at math.

[u/Ojrsh]

This video is pointless. In no way it shows or discuss what makes him a "genius". We don't know what achievements he has, according to the video, he just works in a mattress shop. I know the definition of the word genius is a bit vague, but genius are valuable to the society in which they operate, they contribute in their society in exceptional ways.