Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• After an assault in 2002, Jason Padgett suffered a brain injury that instilled within him a perviously unknown mathematical genius.
• Padgett became one of only a few dozen examples worldwide of acquired savant syndrome—a condition where someone experiences some form of brain trauma and gains new mental abilities in math, art, or music.
• The leading theory is that damage to the left hemisphere of the brain wakes up parts of the right hemisphere to compensate, unleashing new levels of genius.

When someone suffers a traumatic brain injury, lots of things can go wrong—but rarely, very rarely, something can go incredibly right.

On the night of September 13, 2002, Jason Padgett—a then 31-year-old futon salesman from Tacoma, Washington—went to a karaoke bar, sang a few songs, drank a Coke, and left. Unfortunately, two men followed him, struck him in the back of the head, and just started pummeling.

“For a moment, I didn’t know where I was, how I got where I was, and everything was spinning, and I was getting kicked in the face and punched,” Padgett told Great Big Story in 2017. “The next morning, everything was different. OCD came on instantly…I was really depressed…I remember hammering three layers of blankets over every single window in my house.”

But compulsion and paranoia were only some of the mental side effects of Padgett’s attack—slowly, something more amazing began to take shape. Padgett saw a “beauty to the universe,” as he describes it, seeing the world in a geometrical relationship to pi. A college dropout, Padgett enrolled in a developmental math class in 2006 at Tacoma Community College, and five years later, while attending a math conference in Europe, he visited a lab in Finland that took an MRI of his parietal lobe. In the process, hefound something amazing.

According to The Seattle Times, when Padgett analyzed mathematical formulas that gave rise to fractal imagery, only his left brain was active. But if the formulas were mathematical nonsense, both sides of the brain were engaged.

This fits one of the key theories behind “acquired savant syndrome”—a condition where someone gains extraordinary abilities in math, music, or art following some type of brain injury (typically following instances of disease, stroke, or assault). This condition differs from congenital savant syndrome, where people are born with incredible gifts, but also live with developmental disabilities similar to Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Rain Man.

Acquired savant syndrome is also incredibly rare, with only 40 or so cases known worldwide. But among those 40 individuals are people like Jon Sarkin, a former chiropractor who suffered a stroke and became an amazing painter, and Orlando Serrell, who was hit in the head with a baseball at age 10 and could suddenly tell you what day of the week a particular date would fall in the distant past or future.

Although no one is completely certain what causes the onset of these incredible abilities, the leading hypothesis posits that damage to the left hemisphere rewrites the brain. Similar to how if you injure one leg you’ll begin favoring the other, damage to the left side of the brain seems to unlock unexplored areas in the right hemisphere, which is associated with creativity.

As for Padgett, in 2014 he put his incredible story to paper writing Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel, and has since given numerous interviews and TED talks regarding both his newly acquired math abilities and his work more broadly.

His accidental brush with genius eventually became his lifelong passion.