5 Unexpected Twists After Accidents Scrambled People’s Brains

5 Turning Into a Math Artist

History doesn’t record exactly what karaoke songs were performed in Tacoma on September 13, 2002. They must have been pretty bad because two men went up to Jason Padgett outside one karaoke bar and kicked his head in. He wound up in the hospital with a concussion, and then he suffered the aftereffects at home. These included a fear of leaving the house, which was probably more a psychological response than anything to do with brain damage.

But he also experienced something stranger. When he saw things move around and form curves, such as water going down the drain, he now pictured these as a series of straight lines that created the curve by outlining it. To understand what that means, here’s a sketch Padgett drew — one of more than a thousand such sketches he’d draw over the next few years. 

Padgett was diagnosed with a variant of synesthesia, where rather than perceiving colors or sounds when confronted with unrelated sensory input, he sees math. Sometimes he sees equations. They aren’t very meaningful equations because he had little training in math himself, having previously sold futons for a living, but he still sees equations of some kind.

Since these powers resulted from traumatic brain injury, he has what’s known as acquired savant syndrome. Plus, his ability to see into the code of the matrix probably means he could beat the hell out of those attackers if he ever runs into them again.

Except, one of those attackers reached out on his own accord, and they reconciled. See, math is the way of peace. 

4 Your Mental Diseases Cured

Padgett’s symptoms also included OCD. For a while, he was washing his hands compulsively. OCD is a disease that can really take over someone’s life, such as in the severe case of one man referred to in medical journals only as George. 

George would wash his hands hundreds of times a day, and he dropped out of college and quit his job. He told his mother he’d rather die than go on, and she replied (according to George’s account), “If your life is so wretched, just go and shoot yourself.” So, he did. One day in 1983, he shot himself in the mouth with a .22-caliber rifle. 

He survived, which is always a risk when you get shot in the head. Doctors removed what bullet fragments they could from his brain but had to leave some in. George recovered, and he discovered he felt radically different from before. His OCD was gone. He now successfully returned to school, and when doctors published his case five years later, he’d moved on to a fine life.

Once again, we should always consider the possibility that a traumatic experience changed him psychologically, but doctors instead describe his experience as a surgical intervention. The bullet had entered his left frontal lobe, the very part that doctors may chip away at in the case of especially extreme conditions. 

As for whether anyone should consider trying something similar as a form of self-medication, doctors said, “No, of course not. What are you, nuts?”

3 Gourmand Syndrome

One 48-year-old patient, recovering from a stroke, expressed dissatisfaction with hospital food, and the doctors laughed this off as a universal reaction. Then he was given a diary to record his thoughts, and he wrote, “Sex I start to really miss, and it is time for a real hearty dinner, e.g. a good sausage with hash browns or some spaghetti Bolognese, or risotto and a breaded cutlet, nicely decorated, or a scallop of game in cream sauce with ‘Spatzle’ (a Swiss and southern German specialty).” 

That seemed a bit odd. Upon being released from the hospital, he quit his job as a political journalist and became a columnist devoted to food.

A second stroke patient, 55 years old, also recorded his thoughts. “My spouse anxiously registers everything I eat and nibble, “ he wrote. “It irritates me. A few steps down the street, we enter a coffee-house. My hand is reaching for pastry, my wife’s hand reaches between. Through the window I see my bank, damn, if I chose, I could buy all the pastry I wanted, including the whole store. The creamy pastry slips from the foil, like a mermaid. I take a bite.”

After seeing these reactions, doctors investigated a larger number of patients and discovered dozens experiencing what’s now called “gourmand syndrome.” Doctors associate it with a specific type of damage to the brain’s right hemisphere. It’s not an eating disorder. Those who have it do not overeat (or undereat). They just become very interested in high-quality food.

Such people need treatment for the rest of their life: They need to eat food, sometimes three times a day or more. 

2 Becoming a Chinese Caricature

One of the sillier possible effects of a coma is known as foreign accent syndrome. The patient awakes speaking differently, perhaps like they’re British or French. One of the more well-known cases of this was singer George Michael, who awoke from a coma in 2012 in what British people assure us was a different British accent from his usual British accent. 

But foreign accent syndrome doesn’t actually give you new linguistic powers. If you wake up and start speaking Mandarin, it means that you picked up Mandarin before the accident, whether or not you realized just how fluent you are. And if foreign accent syndrome gives you a Chinese accent, you can only manage as good an accent as you were ever capable of. 

So, take a listen to Sarah Colwill:

She went to the hospital in 2010 with a migraine and came out with what doctors call a Chinese accent. Only, hearing those words come out of her mouth, you might describe that more as comical broken English from a British woman mocking Chinese people.

Foreign accent syndrome is, in fact, a speech impediment. Hers isn’t a genuine Chinese accent, as Colwill herself would tell anyone who’d ask. That’s if she could get them to listen. When she’d call people on the phone, they’d hang up, thinking she was pranking them. 

1 Absolutely Nothing

A Frenchman came to the hospital in 2007 with a seemingly insignificant complaint: His legs felt weak. Doctors gave him some scans and discovered something slightly more serious: He appeared to be missing almost his entire brain. Instead of the usual mix of white and gray matter, 90 percent of his brain consisted of ventricles filled with fluid but with no cells. 

It had to have had something to do with a childhood incident, in which a hospital had inserted a shunt to remove some fluid from his skull. But despite largely lacking a brain, the man appeared normal, and he displayed no symptoms, other than the unrelated leg condition. 

They tested his IQ, and he scored a 70, which puts him in the bottom 5 percentile of the population. That might sound appropriately low, but it means he scored higher than hundreds of millions of people would. Plus, he got an 84 on a special “verbal IQ” test, which would put him ahead of more than a billion people. Traditional medical wisdom says that someone missing so much brain matter shouldn’t be conscious at all, much less should be able to be compared to regular people on intelligence tests.

But the guy lived just fine, throwing into disarray everything we thought about how mental function works. He even had a wife and two kids and had a perfectly normal relationship with them. 

As for how he was able to engage in a profession despite lacking a brain, well, it turned out that he worked for the government, so that cleared up one mystery. 

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