Jason Padgett likes drawing circles made up of increasingly many triangles, what he refers to as an illustration of pi.
Courtesy of Jason Padgett
Snowshoes and Math Create Frozen Art: Photos
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apres-ski means a warm chalet, hot drink, spa or dinner. To Simon Beck of Great Britain, it means creating intricate pictures in the snow. And not just snow angels: Beck’s snow art involves mathematical patterns and often stretches the length of several soccer fields. "There’s a frozen lake outside where I stay, and one day after skiing I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to make a pattern?" he said. "I didn’t have any snow shoes, just walking boots, but the snow wasn’t too deep and it worked perfectly well." He’s been doing it ever since, and recently collected 200 of his favorite images in the book "Snow Art" . PHOTOS: 2014 Art of Science Competition Winners
COURTESY SIMON BECK
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After Beck read New York Times reporter James Gleick’s book, "Chaos: Making a New Science," he started incorporating mathematical patterns into his work. "That’s part of my inspiration," he said. The Koch curve snowflake shown here is one of his favorite patterns. PHOTOS: Bodypainting Festival Brings Art to Life
Courtesy Simon Beck
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Beck has been creating snow art seriously for about five years. One of his favorite patterns to stomp, shown here, is based on the Sierpinski triangle. "It’s quite easy to do, and it makes a good impact," he said. "I also use it as one element in larger works." PHOTOS: Prehistoric Child Art Found in Caves
Courtesy Simon Beck
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Pictured, a Sierpinski circle displayed, briefly, at a ski resort in 2014. PHOTOS: Rome's Street Art Has International Flair
COURTESY SIMON BECK
View Caption + #5: Beck also likes to make patterns that are variations on the
Mandelbrot set . He created this one, shown here after 26 hours, in a total of 32 hours over three days. PHOTOS: Unreal Micro Art - How Do They Do It?
Courtesy Simon Beck
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“The biggest was about 10 soccer fields,” he said. “It’s a bit hard to measure, but a decent-sized project is about three soccer fields. That takes one day if conditions are good.” Good conditions mean 6-inch deep snow, or 6 inches of powder on top of a firm base. BLOG: Why Dried Whiskey Under Microscope Looks Like Art
Courtesy Simon Beck
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"Quite honestly, once I have good photos I don’t care how long they stay around for," he said. Beck does most of his work in a French ski resort where he spends his winters. Frozen lakes are ideal. In those kinds of conditions, he’ll make do about two projects per week, posting photos on Facebook. Photos: Ocean Artists Convey Horror and Magic
COURTESY SIMON BECK
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Beck also occasionally works on commission, creating logos in different locations. PHOTOS: Most Ancient Art Up Close
Courtesy Simon Beck
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Beck, a map-maker by trade, says the designs come naturally. "It’s just like map making," he said. "It’s the same process, in reverse." Bonus: the walking keeps him in shape. "I don’t need to do any exercise apart from snow art," he said. PHOTOS: Cave Paintings: Behind the Artists
Courtesy Simon Beck
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After his injury, Padgett was drawing complex geometric shapes, but he didn't have the formal training to understand the equations they represented. One day, a physicist spotted him making these drawings in a mall, and urged him to pursue mathematical training. Now Padgett is a sophomore in college and an aspiring number theorist.
Padgett's remarkable abilities garnered the interest of neuroscientists who wanted to understand how he developed them.
DCI
Sometimes, math can be hard ... but can it also be beautiful?
Beautiful mind
Berit Brogaard, a philosophy professor now at the University of Miami, in Coral Gables, Fla., and her colleagues scanned Padgett's brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to understand how he acquired his savant skills and the synesthesiathat allows him to perceive mathematical formulas as geometric figures. (Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which one sense bleeds into another.) [ Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind]
"Acquired savant syndrome is very rare," Brogaard said, adding that only 15 to 25 cases have ever been described in medical studies.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging measures changes in blood flow and oxygen use throughout the brain. During scans of Padgett, the researchers showed the man real and nonsense mathematical formulas meant to conjure images in his mind.
The resulting scans showed significant activity in the left hemisphere of Padgett's brain, where mathematical skills have been shown to reside. His brain lit up most strongly in the left parietal cortex, an area behind the crown of the head that is known to integrate information from different senses. There was also some activation in parts of his temporal lobe (involved in visual memory, sensory processing and emotion) and frontal lobe (involved in executive function, planning and attention).
But the fMRI only showed what areas were active in Padgett's brain. In order to show these particular areas were causing the man's synesthesia, Brogaard's team used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which involves zapping the brain with a magnetic pulse that activates or inhibits a specific region. When they zapped the parts of Padgett's parietal cortex that had shown the greatest activity in the fMRI scans, it made his synesthesia fade or disappear, according to a study published in August 2013 in the journal Neurocase.
Brogaard showed, in another study, that when neurons die, they release brain-signaling chemicals that can increase brain activity in surrounding areas. The increased activity usually fades over time, but sometimes it results in structural changes that can cause brain-activity modifications to persist, Brogaard told Live Science.
Scientists don't know whether the changes in Padgett's brain are permanent, but if he had structural changes, it's more likely his abilities are here to stay, Brogaard said.
The savant in everyone
So do abilities like Padgett's lie dormant in everyone, waiting to be uncovered? Or was there something unique about Padgett's brain to begin with?
Most likely, there is something dormant in everyone that Padgett tapped into, Brogaard said. "It would be quite a coincidence if he were to have that particular special brain and then have an injury," she said. "And he's not the only [acquired savant]."
In addition to head injuries, mental disease has also been known to reveal latent abilities. And Brogaard and others have done studies that suggest zapping the brains of normal people using TMS can temporarily bring out unusual mathematical and artistic skills.
Yet Padgett wouldn't change his new abilities if he could. "It's so good, I can't even describe it," he said.
It's always possible that having savant skillsmay come with trade-offs. In Padgett's case, he developed fairly severe post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and he still finds it difficult to appear in public.
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