By Anupum Pant
Jason Padgett was a community college dropout at the age of 31 and was raising a daughter by being a furniture salesman. He had no interest in numbers. In 2002, one night in Tacoma, Washington, near a Karaoke bar, he ran into a few thugs who were there to mug him. From them, he suffered serious head injuries and somehow survived. But something changed.
An ordinary furniture salesman, and a drop-out now had turned into a mathematical prodigy and started seeing geometrical shapes all around. He now started to comprehend the meaning of pi, and much more. He became the first recorded case of acquired savant syndrome – something that has been historically seen in only 40 people across the world.
Stories like these make me question if there’s immense brain power naturally granted to us, and it’s just a matter of some mysterious event to unlock those powers.