The Best Video Essays of 2022 | Aperture
The useless information, the things that we think about when we want to escape. Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. I mean, fruit flies don't fly like a banana; even bananas probably don't fly like bananas. Not like I've seen a banana fly, have you seen? I'm just saying that fruit flies like a banana.
Okay, I'm sorry. The other day I slipped and hit my head. I still feel a bit woozy, and well, sorry if I don't make much sense. Jason Padgett also didn't make much sense after he was hit in the head in 2002. He was an ordinary adolescent, he didn't do that well in school and considered math useless.
One September night, he was out on one of the many night outs he had, and after singing karaoke at a pub, Jason was just about to call it a night. Before he knew it, he'd been hit in the back of his head by two men, beaten profusely, and left there with his injuries. People at the hospital sent him home after diagnosing a concussion and a bleeding kidney, thinking nothing more of it.
In Jason's head, however, things were far worse. He almost overnight developed an intense germaphobia and a general OCD with things. He would wash his hands over and over again and completely locked himself into his home. It was during one of those many, many hand washes that he noticed the water streaming down the sink. Instead of seeing the droplets slowly recede into the sink like usual, he noticed an almost fragmented reality.
It was like a video. He says that he watched frame by individual frame. He would spend hours trying to draw what he saw in the form of fractal diagrams. One day, he was drawing them while he was at a mall, and a person walking by him took keen interest. He happened to be a mathematician who, for once, could appreciate what Jason was seeing in all its mathematical glory.
He explained to Jason that the things he was describing were discoveries that were Nobel Prize worthy and that he should really consider focusing on it full-time. At this time, Jason thought he was going insane. He even contacted psychologists about his symptoms. They eventually diagnosed him with acquired Savant syndrome and placed him in a synesthesia group study.
Synesthesia is a phenomenon of sensory hyper-connectivity, where one can experience multimodal sensations like seeing sound or tasting a memory. Some of our favorite musicians, like Lorde and Pharrell Williams, have it. Jason was diagnosed with some version of it, although in his case, it's expressed in math rather than music. Jason has now become a number theorist.
Scientists say the region of the brain that allows savants to do what they do exists in all of us. It just so happens that most of us don't have access to them. So there could be a number theorist in all of us. Anybody could be anything; anything could be in anything. But wait, maybe I'm just losing my mind again—everything cannot be in everything. A country, for example, cannot be in another country, can it?
Um, presenting to you Dahala Khagrabari. It's a part of India within a part of Bangladesh within a part of India. Let me explain: an enclave is a part of a country that is surrounded by foreign territory. The Vatican City is one such enclave. But, contrary to the Vatican where people speak Italian, people living in places like Dahala Khagrabari speak a different language, are part of a different culture, and quite simply live a different life.
The Holacgrabari was one of only three third-order enclaves, meaning it is an enclave within another enclave within another enclave. How did this all come to be? Well, this bizarre geographic anomaly seems to have been caused by an equally bizarre pastime: chess. Yes, when kings of the 18th century weren't executing people at will, they were playing chess with them.
It seems to be a result of this chess playing that entire groups of people were just moved around at a time when the borders were yet to be drawn. Fast forward 300 years, the borders are here, but their situation was largely unresolved. These people had no legal existence or a way to get into their homeland. They were not granted basic necessities by the government or the territory in which they...