But while Padgett was experiencing all these negative consequences from his attack, something incredible was happening too. The way Jason was seeing things changed.

“Everything that was curved looked like it was slightly pixelated,” he explains. “Water coming down the drain didn’t look like it was a smooth, flowing thing anymore, it looked like these little tangent lines.”

The same thing happened with clouds, sunlight streaming between trees and puddles. To Padgett, the world essentially looked like a retro video game. Seeing such a radically different view of his surroundings evoked conflicting emotions in Padgett. “I was surprised…confused. It was beautiful but it was also scary at the same time.”

Because of these visions, Padgett began to think about huge questions in relation to mathematics and physics. Given his hermit-like existence at that time, the internet became a valuable source of information to him as he read extensively about mathematics online.

He stumbled across a webpage about fractals which struck a chord with him. It’s a difficult mathematical concept which, put at its most basic, can be likened to a snowflake. When you zoom in, you will see it’s made up of smaller snowflakes connected together, zoom in again and those snowflakes are made of smaller snowflakes, and so on until infinity.

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Padgett felt compelled to explore this intriguing concept further. So, he began to draw. And he kept drawing.

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Padgett believed his drawings “held the key to the universe” and were so important that he needed to take them everywhere with him.

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“I would always describe that math was shapes not numbers and that was the first time I’d heard anybody but me talk about what numbers looked like,” says Padgett.

He scoured the internet for more information and came across Berit Brogaard, a cognitive neuroscientist now at the University of Miami. The pair spent hours talking on the phone and from these conversations, Brogaard hypothesised that Padgett had synaesthesia – essentially a cross-wiring of the brain in which the senses get mixed up.

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“I see it [beauty] everywhere,” he says. He is mesmerised by simple things that most people don’t even notice such as raindrops falling on a puddle.

Through Padgett’s eyes, the puddle is transformed into complex rippling patterns, overlapping and forming shapes like stars or snowflakes. And he wants everyone else to see what he sees.

“You should be walking around in absolute amazement at all times that reality even exists,” he says. “I’m having this mathematical awakening and all around us is absolute magic or about as close as you can get to magic.”