West Nile virus survivor Charles Atkinson spent 400 days on a ventilator
CAMBRIDGE - Massachusetts now has its first two cases of West Nile virus this year. The illness can leave long lasting consequences. Charles Atkinson contracted it a decade ago and almost died. Now he is using his experience to revolutionize how we think and learn.
Atkinson was bitten by a mosquito during a party at his home in Cambridge. A week later he was in a coma. When he awoke at Massachusetts General Hospital, doctors told him he had West Nile virus. The illness left him on a respirator for 400 days, and nearly killed him several times. It also paralyzed him at the time.
"It turns out, I had long-term, chronic West Nile virus," Atkinson told WBZ-TV.
He has since regained the ability to walk with assistance. He says physical therapists noticed he was making progress, so they put him in a boot camp to regain his abilities. After he started to make progress, Atkinson began using himself as a test subject to research a better way to stay healthy. Thirty times a day he makes sure to get up and sit down quickly 10 times in a row. He believes it reduces atrophy. He also walks a tenth of a mile around his home, and the progress is tracked on an app.
"I realized the exercise styles, and being thin, were the only things that could save me," adds Atkinson.
His theories extend beyond his physical therapy. While he was paralyzed, he began theorizing a re-mapping of the brain. Before the incident, he spent decades researching the brain and teaching methods.
"Even though my body wasn't working, my brain and mind were still functioning," Atkinson said. "I am kind of an inventor, and I said there is a better way to present this content, so ordinary people can understand it. I discovered that the brain's structure is like a cube."
He describes the brain as not just any cube, but a Rubik's cube. He says there are layers to it from right to left, and from top to bottom. The layers and portions pertain to different human thought processes or functions.
"The breakthrough was realizing it was back to front," explains Atkinson.
Atkinson and a team of researchers are working to pair his brain structure theory with artificial intelligence (AI). Ever since AI began to boom, he realized his structure may be able to revolutionize the way we think about teaching.
"Put it all together to build a universal repository of learning that will store all of the curricular in the world. It will store not just a Wikipedia of information, but to create and to use, and make learning accessible," Atkinson said.