I've always learned things very, very easily. Especially scientific and mathematical things. In the second grade we had a project where we were supposed to write about something that we enjoyed that we would then take turns teaching the class about. Some kids talked about their pets. Others talked about sports. I gave a lecture on hyperspatial geometry and the Everett Interpretation of quantum mechanics. As a teenager I taught myself Einstein's theory of relativity.

While growing up my father noticed that I had the same issue he did: I could be “triggered” into a trance-like state wherein I went unresponsive and unaware until I emerged minutes or hours later with a flash of insight. The trigger was often somebody asking me a difficult question. He was a computer engineer in the early early days of personal computers, and pursued research and development of artificial intelligence in his own lab he had set up at home, where he also worked on a formal inductive logic.

When he saw that I got into the same states he did for the same reasons he started training me in them. He would talk for hours about topics in theoretical physics, artificial intelligence, mathematics, and more. He then kept giving me difficult questions and problems in these fields, trying to trigger that insight-trance. He said he wanted to help me develop my potential.

I went into physics in college, as it was a field I really enjoyed. After finishing all my undergraduate classes I wanted more, and taught myself advanced postgraduate topics like perturbation theory. I had no teacher, because it was not part of any course offered at the university. It was also too difficult for me to teach myself out of a book. So I entered a deep meditative state and spread all of my books out around me at once and started reading them all, jumping from one to another, keeping my meditative trance. It triggered one of the most powerful eureka flashes I ever experienced and I wound up with an understanding of the theory, and an ability to calculate with it.

This experience changed my direction in science. I realized that I wasn't really a physicist. I realized that what I had been interested in was the process of solving physics problems, not so much the problems themselves. It was the eureka moment I was interested in. How did it occur? Why? Could I control it? It seemed possible: I had triggered it that night with meditation, and my father often had been able to trigger it in me during my lessons with him.

I dropped out of school and pursued my own studies at this point. I devoted myself to learning everything that I could about the eureka moment, and the inductive logic I had helped my father finally develop, and my own experiments in artificial intelligence. (It may seem an odd collection of unrelated topics, but they had deep connections, the way I went at them.) I would never be paid for these things, because no one in the wider world had much use for them. (Not even the artificial intelligence: I was working on general AI while the business world wanted narrow expert systems.) But working for free at what I loved was better than making loads of money following someone else's dream, to me.

During this period of research I also started redeveloping the lost art of the berserkergang, an internal-style martial art of many ancient peoples such as the vikings. By researching the ancient sagas of the viking and other peoples and also anatomy, physiology, and neurobiology I was able to rediscover how the ancient berserker warriors entered their battle-trances that they used to boost their strength and reflexes. (It seems to work by the berserker inducing a unitary state to influence the hormone system to, amongst other things, dump the full contents of the adrenal glands into the bloodstream.)

I wrote about my findings and experiences with the gangr, as the berserk trance is called, online. I met many other berserks online, and many who had similar practices that were not martial. We started pooling our experiences and insights, and learned much from each other. We learned that the nature of the berserker trance could be varied. It could, for instance, be used to increase the speed with which you heal. Several of us, myself included, noticed that entering the gangr in a different way than usual would produce what we at first called an “intellectual gangr”. This sort of gangr didn't seem to boost the physical strength so much but did seem to increase the intellect and give rise to plentiful eureka moments. Indeed, this state seemed like an extended eureka moment.

The term “intellectual gangr” seemed cumbersome, though. When we noticed a better term in fiction we grabbed it, as it seemed such a good description, and rolled off the tongue better. From Phil and Kaja Folio's Girl Genius, an (excellent) online steampunk graphic novel about mad scientists, we grabbed the term “madspace” to refer to this state.

In addition to rediscovering the techniques for attaining the berserker state of physiology and helping to develop an inductive logic, I also have produced a few prototype AIs. I have developed some VERY cheap-to-build wind turbines with a cheaper and more efficient way of storing power than usual. (Almost got killed and did get a leg broken testing one. Always tell someone where you're going if you are heading deep into the wilderness to test a dangerous prototype. That was a LONG crawl home.) I am currently researching the possibilities inherent in different machines for deepening the meditative trance. And I have been one of the co-developers of a powerful new technique for inducing madspace, amongst other things, called the psymech eureka technique.