For my presentation, I would describe my injury and subsequent impressions as well as display and explain my geometric drawings. I decided to try to record this event and began seeking videographers who might want to travel with me. After interviewing several candidates, I settled on the affable Paul Synowiec. His work samples were very impressive, and, just as important, he was a very easygoing person able to get along with me from the start.
This is the image I see in my mind’s eye when I think of Hawking radiation and the way radiation is emitted from a micro black hole. It’s my most difficult drawing to date—it took me nine months to complete.
A computer-generated fractal image created using the Mandelbrot set shown at varying degrees of magnification. I’m fascinated by the way fractal patterns appear in nature, from the branches of a tree to the blood vessels in the body.
The images here show the evolution of my pi drawing. First I made the circle out of 180 triangles, then 360, then 720. With a finer pencil, I could draw even more. Through this process, I came to understand how pi is calculated by measuring the area of a circle.
This is the pattern of lines I see overlaid on water going down the drain in the shower or the sink.
When I look at waves of water interfering with one another, I see overlapping iterations of my pi image. This drawing was also inspired by the doubleslit experiment, which reveals the interactions of light waves.
I see this image in my mind’s eye, now in 3-D, every time I imagine how my hand moves through space-time.
After I began to practice meditation, the two-dimensional images I saw in my head became three-dimensional. “Quantum Star” was my first drawing inspired by this new shift in perception.
My conception of particle fusion. I imagine the center hexagon as the inert iron core of a star and the six surrounding hexagons as the outer mass, collapsing due to the immense pull of gravity. I’m fascinated by the process of fusion and the possibility of harnessing it to create unlimited, clean energy.
Me in my wild days, back in 1988. I swear never to have that haircut again!
Elena and I, in our courting days, visiting the home of the great Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin. I’ve seen so much more of the world thanks to Elena.
This is me in 2011 on the stage at Aula Magna Hall in Stockholm, where some of the Nobel Prizes are awarded each year. I was getting ready to make my debut at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference, and for a moment I turned away from the spotlight, which struck me with its beautiful rays as a reflection of how I measure pi as a circle subdivided by triangles.
This is me being tested by the transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) device in Helsinki, Finland. Don’t you think I look like Anakin Skywalker?
Chapter Thirteen
Savant and Yogi?
THOUGH I WAS happy and inspired by my trip to New York, the flight back to Tacoma turned out to be a difficult one for me physically. I fidgeted the entire six hours to relieve aches and pains and was incredibly stiff and sore upon arrival. With the trip to Stockholm only a few months away, I worried that I’d have an even more difficult time during my next flight. My doctor recommended a pain-management clinic and I signed up immediately.
Attending the clinic was like a job; it required me to go five days a week for eight hours a day for two months. On the menu of services were meditation, exercise, group therapy, and regular medical consultations with a team of doctors. The meditation and group therapy were new experiences for me, and I was somewhat nervous about trying them. I found myself once again taking time off from the futon store. I was pretty useless there anyway, as I was in so much pain.
Elena was really concerned about me during this time. She told me she thought the words pain-management clinic sounded really awful and she was worried that I needed something so serious. But we thought I should try it, as nothing else was making me better.
“I want you to imagine your whole body relaxing,” said our soft-spoken meditation leader on the first day; I was lying flat on a mat on the floor. “Breathe in, breathe out, from your belly to your chest; deep, deep breaths.”
I watched as not only my chest but also my stomach rose. It was incredible how much more air I could get in my lungs that way.
“Now imagine the tips of your fingers relaxing, feel it through your wrists; now your elbows . . . Continue to breathe in and breathe out from your stomach. Feel the relaxation extend to your shoulders.”
I felt my arms turn to Jell-O. I had never once in my life stopped so completely to focus on relaxing. It felt amazing.
“Now pause and relax everything some more, take it further.”
I didn’t think it was possible to go even more limp and more relaxed, but I followed the instruction and found myself practically sinking into the hardwood floor beneath me.
For five to ten minutes, I felt a weird but totally pleasant and warm state of well-being. When we rose slowly from the mats at the end of the exercise, my pain was lessened. It was a watershed moment for me. I never knew I had this ability inside me. I’d been so frenetic for years, and stillness had been the furthest thing from my mind. Even in my years of isolation in my home, my mind had been racing. No one was more surprised than me that there was actually something to this meditation practice. Perhaps my mind really could help heal my body, I thought.
I became more practiced at meditation in the coming days and weeks, and the instructor asked me to participate in a little experiment. I was game. He hooked me up to some electrodes and tested my ability to self-modulate. He had me look at an electronic monitor as sine wave after sine wave went by like a series of hills on a cross-country drive. I tried to make the apex of each wave as round as possible through regular, deep breathing and focused attention.
“Okay, I’ve got this!” I said excitedly at one point, noticing how I was able to help form a beautiful, symmetrical wave every ten seconds.
The instructor next took my pulse and blood pressure. I’d succeeded in lowering both considerably in our session. He was amazed to learn the temperature of my skin had gone up about six or seven degrees—something he’d never recorded a person doing on a first try before, he said.
“You’re really good at this for a beginner, Jason—bravo!” he remarked. “Now, make sure you continue to practice at home.”
When we were finished I walked over to the chalkboard in the room and drew a blood vessel—a cylinder, really—for the instructor to consider. I drew cross sections of it in a subsequent rendering and explained how my temperature was raised due to increased blood flow and surface area in my vessels.
“That’s right!” said the instructor.
“Even our bodies come down to geometry,” I said with a smile as I turned to leave.
I was really fascinated by this practice and so convinced of its healing effects that I started telling friends and relatives that it should be taught to every human being, everywhere. In fact, I said, I believed that young children should learn this in school. It was as important as any other skill we could acquire in life. I bet it would have a positive effect on global relations if everyone would take the time to meditate each day.
While meditating at home once, I found myself thinking of a pentagon, like the one I’d seen on my late stepfather’s uniform. I started to draw it, exploring its inner space with additional lines and angles according to things I was now seeing in my mind’s eye, inspired by the initial shape. Only this time, instead of the image being extremely beautiful and two-dimensional, it was much more beautiful and seemed to appear in three dimensions. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was as though I had just stepped from a gray Kansas plain into the Technicolor land of Oz.
I sat there exploring this development for some time. I noticed I could shift my attention and throw the shapes out from my mind’s eye into space around me so that I was standing amid them. Then I could move my attention toward them and float over them, under them, even behind them, projecting my awareness out into space
. It was so cool. I stared at it and saw how it had depth for the first time, and I was transfixed. Some lines appeared to be behind other ones instead of flat as they had before. I’d never seen anything so stunning.
I arrived early to the pain-management clinic the next day just to report this to my instructor. “Perhaps because of your practice, your mind is refining these images even further,” he said, delighted.
I continued to work on my first 3-D drawing in celebration of this development. The image, which I titled “Quantum Star,” came to me as I explored the inner spaces of a pentagon.
I told Maureen about this development and she thought it was so significant she put me in touch with another conference participant I would be presenting with in Stockholm, the medical anthropologist William C. Bushell, then the director of East-West Research for Tibet House in New York. The Harvard- and MIT-trained researcher had spent thirty years documenting the health benefits of meditation and had heard about all sorts of experiences, many of them from really adept yogis and lamas from the Indo-Tibetan tradition. At Tibet House, Dr. Bushell worked with the Columbia professor Robert Thurman, an Indo-Tibetan studies scholar who also happened to be the actress Uma Thurman’s father. Together, the researchers ran their own conferences featuring His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other great meditation experts.
I still wondered if what I was seeing was tied to some fundamental fabric of things. Could I be seeing the hidden structure of what’s all around us at some beyond-microscopic level?
“It is indeed possible to see things at the quantum level of the photon,” Dr. Bushell explained to me, noting cutting-edge biological research on the human retina that proved humans could detect light at its quantum-mechanical limits, something no artificial detection device could surpass. He cited the work of Princeton biophysicist William Bialek.
“Our eyes are actually that subtle, but we don’t all have access to it at a conscious level. Adept meditators report some of the things you are seeing, so it may be tied to meditation somehow.” Dr. Bushell referred me to scientific papers backing up what he told me, and he himself had published papers connecting this amazing discovery to things advanced meditators said about what they saw in darkened environments. As far back as 1998, University of Washington professor Fred Rieke and Stanford neurobiologist Denis Baylor had written, in Reviews of Modern Physics, that our eyes were “nearly perfect photon counters.”
This made me wonder: if the human eye is equipped to see at the quantum level, why doesn’t everybody see what I see? I went back to brain science to look for answers. Our brains are very, very busy—each one processing millions of bits of visual information with each passing second. Experts have long believed that the brain filters out the vast majority of this incoming raw data. Did this mean that other people’s eyes were receiving the same visual input mine did, but their brains were just weeding it out like some sort of visual spam? It made me wish I could tell people how to switch off the brain’s filter so they could see what I see, because it definitely isn’t spam.
The more I talked with Dr. Bushell, the more I thought that meditation might be one way for people to remove those filters. According to Bushell’s extensive research, people who meditate regularly may be able to enhance the way their visual systems work, which might allow them to see things in nature that are hidden from nonmeditators. I had been seeing the hidden fabric of the world in all those geometric shapes already; Dr. Bushell explained that meditation might have something to do with the sudden blossoming of my synesthesia from two dimensions to three.
The medical anthropologist believed synesthetes had extraordinary doorways to perception and said that even the great Japanese Zen master Dōgen had written of synesthesia being present at enlightenment. Dr. Bushell had told Maureen in a previous interview, “Synesthesia may not only be associated with the highest spiritual states, it may be necessary for them.” I had never really thought about the concept of enlightenment before, but the more I learned about it, the more what Dr. Bushell was saying made sense to me. Some of the terms I came across in my research on enlightenment were awakening, self-awareness, and understanding the connectedness of everything. I could see how synesthetes, with their blended senses, might be more in tune with these things.
When I told Dr. Bushell about the pain relief I’d experienced after meditating, he wasn’t surprised at all. In fact, he told me that when it comes to relieving pain, scientific evidence shows that meditation and hypnosis can be just as effective as opioids—the most powerful pharmacological treatment. He said that brain-imaging studies showed how it works. One study that was especially encouraging to me was a joint effort between the University of California, Irvine, and the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention. They used fMRI brain scans to test the response to pain in twelve long-term meditators and twelve nonmeditators. Compared to the nonmeditators, the meditators showed up to 50 percent less activity in areas of the brain associated with pain response. But what was really cool was that after the nonmeditators spent five months learning how to meditate, their scans showed up to 50 percent reduced activity in the brain’s pain centers compared to their first test.
Equally exciting to me was learning that the practice also reduced symptoms associated with PTSD. One study that appeared in Military Medicine found that veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who practiced meditating for just eight weeks reduced their PTSD symptoms by 50 percent. If it was that helpful for Marines returning from war zones, then it just might be helpful for me too.
To get the maximum benefit from meditation, however, I needed to learn how to relax and clear my mind, because I couldn’t stop the images I saw, even with my eyes closed. What a surprise to hear Dr. Bushell say that the stereotypical notion of meditation as a clearing of the mind or a lack of thought isn’t the only way to do it. Apparently, some people practice types of meditation specifically designed to develop mental imagery. I was glad I didn’t have to worry that I always needed to see a black screen when I closed my eyes for my meditation to be effective.
From everything I had told Dr. Bushell, he said he thought that something extraordinary was going on with my skill at concentrating, something he referred to as yogic ability. He said that savants have an enormous ability to focus, and he thought that my success at self-regulating my blood pressure, heart rate, and skin temperature signaled a high aptitude for meditation. I had to agree. I’d never before been able to sit still and ponder things. And what about the four years I’d spent holed up in my home just thinking?
He told me that even Einstein and Newton practiced this sort of isolation, meditating on a problem. I couldn’t believe that my behavior mirrored that of my scientific heroes, not to mention that of some of the top meditators of the world. Talking with Dr. Bushell confirmed for me I was on the right path with this new practice in my life.
In Stockholm I got to meet Dr. Bushell in person as well as his collaborator Neil Theise, a physician, stem-cell researcher, synesthete, and Zen student for twenty-five years. Their double-act presentation for Maureen’s synesthesia workshop at the consciousness meeting and the discussions in the group that followed expanded on many of these themes of meditation and consciousness. I could hardly wait to learn more about how it all might apply to me.
I would later get to talk with Dr. Theise about how I fit into the wider theme of the conference: that it was about not only biology but also consciousness and its various forms. He talked to me about the self-organizing nature of the universe, the idea that the world self-assembles from the smallest Planck scale all the way up through the everyday world to the vast, cosmic scale. He said that according to long-accepted theories, the smallest things—whether they were strings or particles or something else—were thought to bubble into existence out of a so-called quantum foam. We can thank Nobel Prize–winning physicist John Archibald Wheeler for this concept of a sort of bubbling foam of matter, antimatter, and space-time itself. The geometry at this level, as Dr. Thei
se pointed out, is distorted, and there are no smooth edges.
No smooth edges? Not even at the tiniest level? Upon learning this, I could hardly contain my excitement. In my mind, this validated not only my belief that fractal geometry and its ability to measure roughness is profoundly important but also my belief that a circle has no smooth curvature when viewed at the smallest scale.
Dr. Theise went on to say that most of this infinitesimally small stuff immediately self-destructs and vanishes, but some of it interacts to “self-assemble into subatomic particles and then into atoms, into molecules, all the way on up to form our bodies, stars and planets, galaxies.” Once again, this made me think of all the fractals I see throughout the universe, and I felt like I must have been on to something when I thought that everything and everyone is a reflection of the same repetitive structure.
But then the stem-cell researcher ventured into philosophical territory that I hadn’t even begun to consider. If everything is self-assembling from quantum foam that comes from nothing, “then what is this nothing out of which everything arises?” he asked. Dr. Theise told me how one perspective, based equally on contemporary Western philosophy and first-person reports from Dr. Bushell’s adept meditators, proposes that this nothingness is the mind itself—and that everything is mind.
Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel Page 16