Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel by Jason Padgett, Maureen Ann Seaberg

interested in the same things I was. With his studious appearance and fair coloring, he even resembled the new me. At one point Tammet said he could do math so well because he could see it in shapes before his eyes.
    I leaped from my chair and began jumping around the room. “That’s it! That’s what’s going on with me. Oh my God! Someone else can see what I see!”
    I rushed to my computer and Googled
Daniel Tammet,
savant syndrome,
and a word I’d never heard before:
synesthesia
. I quickly learned that synesthesia is a sort of blending of the senses that can take many forms. Some people with synesthesia see colors when they look at numbers or letters—for example,
A
might be orange,
B
might be violet, and
C
might be lime green. Others see colors when they hear music. Still others may taste words or smell colors. In Tammet’s case, he saw numbers as colors and shapes and said this helped him to remember them and calculate with great ease.
    When I looked up savant syndrome, I found that, by definition, a savant is someone with a lot of knowledge about a particular subject or field. But the term often gets used to describe a person whose unusual aptitude for a specific subject or skill comes along with decreased abilities in other areas. Most savants, like the extremely high-functioning Tammet, are born that way. Not me. I was quickly realizing that my situation was far more rare. Experts called it sudden-onset savant syndrome or acquired savant syndrome. I read all I could for many hours into the morning. Then I slept deeply, for the first time in months, with my face on the keyboard. The worry and confusion of the past three years had finally lifted a little.
    Knowing I had a brain injury was pretty frightening. But sensing that I might have acquired synesthesia and savantism as a result was oddly exciting. Except I had no idea what those things were. After three years out of work, I definitely couldn’t afford the required testing and medical advice, nor did I want to emerge from my house, so I set out to learn all I could on my own. I continued to mine that mother lode of all knowledge, the Internet.
    I learned that at that time, there were only thirty documented cases of acquired savant syndrome on the entire planet, and none of the savants also had synesthesia. Could I be the only one in the world? I’d felt such pangs of recognition in seeing Tammet describe his own naturally occurring synesthesia and savantism, I was sure I must be right in thinking I had these syndromes. But I was not sure I wanted to be this new self, regardless of its rarity and its attractions.
    Fortunately, I found I was living in a time of unprecedented research into both conditions. I had plenty of reading to do, as one Internet search led to another and then another. I discovered some very good journals and magazines reporting on both savantism and synesthesia, and I even found some YouTube interviews with savants and synesthetes. I watched video after video of people with one or the other of my two not-yet-diagnosed traits. I viewed them over and over, staring into the subjects’ eyes, wondering what it was like to be them. To be me.
    A few decades ago, if someone reported seeing synesthetic shapes for numbers and equations, doctors probably would have thought that person was hallucinating. But my injury and subsequent acquired synesthesia happened in the beginning of the twenty-first century and coincided with a surge of interest in this neurological topic. This newfound fascination was fueled by state-of-the-art brain-imaging technology, which, for the first time in history, allowed researchers to see various areas of the brain light up as it worked. When a person with synesthesia was shown numbers or letters while his brain was being scanned, scientists reported that two parts of the brain lit up; in a neurotypical subject, there was usually just a single area of response. That synesthesia was real and provable inspired many