ABSTRACT
As a young man, Jason Padgett was what he has described as ‘a mediocre student at best’. However, his identity itself would change completely after muggers beat him around the head outside of a bar in 2002, leaving him with a severe concussion. Fortunately, Padgett survived and sought medical attention, guiding himself through physical recovery, though the vicious assault understandably left him with an array of residual effects, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), agoraphobia, and other anxieties. While self-constrained to his home, Padgett eventually began to notice unusual visual artifacts. Geometrical lines and shapes would appear to him in everyday items, like a stream of water pouring from the bathroom faucet. Reading up on his experiences, Padgett came to a conclusion and consulted a professional for confirmation: he had developed synesthesia, a rare condition in which one’s perceptions seem to overlap between senses. Other synesthetes report seeing numbers as having particular colors, hearing musical tones as certain colors, and sounds having particular textures. Padgett began to draw what he was seeing, soon venturing out of his home to attend the local college, where he honed an expanding skillset in mathematics, an area that he had previously struggled in. As with Dahl’s case of expanded creativity post-injury, Padgett appeared to have released an underlying intelligence that he was not aware he had, though it came with a number of other disruptive emotional complications. His case joins the few others whose descriptions of the world appear more vivid than others’, and lends to cognitive neuroscience an aspect that we may potentially be able to connect to savant syndrome, connecting once more to sensory processing and what we previously considered to be secondary effects of the autism spectrum.
