Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel by Jason Padgett, Maureen Ann Seaberg Read Free Book Online Page A

inability to relate. It’s not always easy to tell if someone’s had a brain injury; TBI survivors tend to look normal. But people with brain injuries can miss important social cues, like when a conversation is over or when someone is growing annoyed or uncomfortable.
    I worried I was becoming another Phineas Gage, the railroad worker whose story I came across in my reading. On September 13, 1848, Gage was leading a group of men working for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad near Cavendish, Vermont. Gage was compacting blasting charges with a large iron rod when the powder exploded and propelled the rod through his head. It was an inch and a quarter thick and more than a yard in length. It pierced the side of his skull behind his left eye and then continued through, exiting out of the top of his head.
    Gage miraculously recovered from the horrible wound and lived, but his personality transformed dramatically. In 1868, one of his doctors, John Martyn Harlow, wrote that the man who had previously been even-tempered, energetic, and well regarded by his peers was now “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom).” Quite simply, wrote Harlow, he was “no longer Gage.”
    Reading about Phineas Gage made me worry. I walked over to the mirror and stared for a long time. I knew I’d become a different person, just like he had. And yet, parts of me were still the same. In the weeks after the mugging, I’d begun to lose weight and looked extremely tired, yes, but when I looked at my eyes, they were the same color and shape. How could they look the same when I was seeing so many new things?
    Fortunately, I had something that Gage did not: access to advanced medical knowledge and high-tech brain-imaging tools. I’d had that one MRI scan for my fasciculations, which to my surprise had come back normal. I have since learned that it’s not that unusual for an MRI to miss the type of damage associated with mild traumatic brain injury. MRIs do provide more detailed three-dimensional images of the brain than CT scans, which are typically used to detect skull fractures and life-threatening bleeding in the brain. But MRIs aren’t sensitive enough to pick up damage at the microscopic or cellular level. Nowadays, there are more effective brain-imaging scans available, such as functional MRI (fMRI), which measures brain activity by showing detailed images of blood flow throughout the brain. This type of test probably could have detected changes in the way my brain functioned. Unfortunately, fMRI wasn’t widely used at the time. I couldn’t afford additional testing anyway, and I’d never heard of anything more advanced than a regular MRI, so I didn’t pursue further studies.
    Even the doctors responsible for my care at the time didn’t recommend any other testing. In the medical community, there are agreed-upon protocols for severe brain injuries—say a bullet wound that leaves a gaping hole. But when it comes to treating closed-head, less traumatic injuries, like mine, there is a bit of a gray area. Despite the fact that my MRI was read as normal, my new impressions of the world persisted, and they were as astonishing as they were disturbing.
    In the mugging, I had received three direct punches to the back and sides of my skull and at least one very hard kick to the back of it. My skull wasn’t fractured, probably owing to bone being one of the strongest materials found in nature.
    Bone is, ounce for ounce, stronger than steel. Even though the eight bones that make up the human skull average only about a quarter of an inch in thickness, some parts of the skull are estimated to be able to withstand a force of twelve hundred to fourteen hundred pounds. Research shows that Olympic and professional boxers are capable of delivering blows that top one thousand pounds of force per square inch. Lucky for me, the guys who assaulted me were likely delivering only about sixty to