Has Savant Jason Padgett Discovered the Theory of Everything?

By Maureen Seaberg

Jason Padgett is not a traditionally trained physicist nor mathematician — he’s more rarefied than that. He is a savant and autodidact whose brain has been on fire about the mysteries of the universe ever since he suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) during a mugging outside a Tacoma, WA karaoke bar in 2001. He acquired sudden, inexplicable and profound gifts.

Padgett, who underwent a complete personality change as evidenced by the following photos, was diagnosed an acquired savant and acquired synesthete by the world’s authority on savants, the late Dr. Darold Treffert, who was Kim Peek’s (Rain Man’s) personal physician.

Not only was he suddenly obsessed with and able to do math and physics he had never studied before — there were tradeoffs from the injury like motion blindness, causing things to move in a jagged, stop-action manner — that made him see things in a new way.

“My personal experience with motion blindness led to a profound realization: spacetime is
fundamentally informational rather than a continuous classical structure,” he explains.

“The inability to perceive smooth, continuous motion suggested that reality itself might be encoded in discrete
quantum state updates, analogous to how digital frames compose a video. This experience prompted an investigation into whether the perception of motion and the fundamental nature of reality are governed…