Review: Struck by Genius

 Struck by Genius is the story of Jason Padgett (ghost written by Maureen Seaberg) about his transition from being a non-academic party animal to becoming a Savant after a mugging that caused a traumatic brain injury.

It is very rare that brain injury can have benefits rather than being purely detrimental, but Padgett was one of the lucky ones. He described his life prior to the mugging, with very little discipline two marriages and a kid out of wedlock, with a focus on partying and disliking academics. He describes this memory like remembering another person.

After the mugging, he started seeing patterns and shapes whenever he saw numbers, and the PTSD caused him to hole up in his apartment for 4 years, seeing no one except his daughter whenever he visited. His fascination with Math and patterns developed and after he had enough self-learning he went back to working at his father's furniture shop and enrolled in community college to learn formal math.

In between, he was compelled to draw. The pieces of art he draws range from simple geometric shapes to his interpretation of a hydrogen atom or quantum events. He says he read Born On a Blue Day and identified himself someone who saw numbers in shapes or colors, and then started going to conferences for people with that syndrome, where he met doctors who tested him and attested that he had all the attributes of a savant born with that syndrome but with fewer drawbacks.

There are all sorts of theories in the book that don't pass muster with me --- for instance, there's a doctor that claims that his mathematical abilities are a result of genetic memory. That makes zero sense and I see no way mathematical concepts could be encoded into genes, other than that the structure of the brain itself is determined (obviously) by genetics. That's also compounded by the fact that as far as I can tell, Padgett hasn't contributed to academic mathematics.

The book is easy reading and quite a bit of fun. I'm not sure I'd agree with many of the conclusions he or his doctors draw from his syndrome, but it's still a remarkable event and story.