Daniel Tammet

Daniel is a very high-functioning autistic person with savant syndrome- he has an extraordinary ability to recall and compute large numbers- due in large part to his unique way of visualizing them as distinct shapes and colors. He has synesthesia with both numbers and words. And he suffered from epilepsy as a child. This memoir describes how he grew up, isolated in many ways yet enjoying his own sensations and obsessions (especially collecting things) and only when he was older having a show more desire to interact with peers learning to navigate social interactions and tasks like shopping or finding his way on bus routes. He describes difficulties in school, living in a large family (nine siblings!) and how he calms himself in stressful situations. How he volunteered to work overseas teaching English as a second language, how his aptitude for learning languages works, how he once memorized and recited 22,000 digits of the number pi to break a world record! (It took five hours to make the recitation). And finally, how he discovered that he's gay, fell in love, and moved in with his partner, living independently and successfully started a business creating a website to help people learn foreign languages. It's astounding. Most of all to me, the very different way in which he visualizes and understands the world. Last year I watched a documentary made about him and I was just blown away. Even the mental games he tells of playing as a child, with numbers, I can't really comprehend. Although the writing style is a bit dry, he recalls incidents with a lot of detail- even from a young age. Some of them sad, to see how peers at first shunned him, and teachers misunderstood. His story of overcoming challenges living with autism and finding his way in the world, to living independently with someone he loves and even finding religion, is very inspiring.

from the Dogear Diary show less

I had first discovered Daniel Tammet with Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant , his autobiography where he retells his life with Asperger, synaesthesia, and savant syndrome. I had found it so compelling (what a incredible mind!) that I decided to follow up with Embracing The Wide Sky.

In here, he takes the reader for a journey across our mind; with insights both from science and his personal experience. All in all, it's a very good read. Brain's structure, show more memory, language, intelligence, creativity, sensory perceptions etc. It's a 'wide sky' indeed, and, so, there is a lot to learn about many topics... that is: if you don't know much about them to start with! Having roughly the same interests as the author when it comes to the brain (hence my interest in him, perhaps?) I knew most of what he was writing about in here. Personally, then, I haven't learnt much. What I found really interesting, though, is how he uses researches and science to, combined with his personal experience, shed more than welcome lights upon various topics.

Having savant syndrome and so a very high IQ (he was encouraged to join Mensa) he nevertheless debunks IQ testing. It's not that he rejects the idea that intelligence can be assessed, but, he insists on how varied such concept is -referring to the works of a Howard Gardner, Daniel Goleman, and else... I liked that part! His arguments echo those of Stephen Jay Gould a few decades ago: 1/ such tests do not 'measure' reflection, critical thinking, creativity, and imagination (they are just a number put on very specific skill, and so cannot account for intelligence as the holistic phenomenon that it is in term of abilities); 2/ they are a vain attempt to concretely quantify, on an ascending scale at that, a feature which is abstract; 3/ they also are dangerously deterministic (not only for their troubled past, but, for blatantly ignoring that our brains are so plastic our 'intelligence' itself is ever-changing...). So much for a fixed value x put on it! He is blunt:

'...the bell curve distribution for IQ scores tells us that two-thirds of the world's population have an IQ somewhere between 85 and 115. This means that some 4.5 billion people around the globe share just 31 numerical values ('He's a 94', 'You're a 110', 'I'm a 103') equivalent to 150 million people worldwide sharing the same IQ score. This reminds me of astrology lumping everyone into one of twelve signs of the zodiac. Is human intelligence really so uniform that it can be summed up in just a handful of figures?'

Being a polyglot who even managed to learn Icelandic in a week for a TV show (yes, you're read that right: he learnt Icelandic in a week -I warned you he's an incredible mind!) his takes on linguistics, foreign language learning in particular, are also interesting and echo my own experience. You don't learn a language using audio-material 'listen-repeat', nor through grammar drills. You learn by submerging yourself in the target language - through reading, watching movies, listening to the radio etc.

'... no child acquires his mother tongue by studying its grammar or making lists of words... it is too fragmentary'

His take on numeracy skills are also interesting. Coming from him (who holds the record for reciting from memory the most digits in the mathematical constant pi -22,514 in five hours!- and is able to perform incredible calculations) they are indeed a fascinating explanation for how he manages such mathematical feats. You know what we all do when playing Scrabble, arranging and re-arranging tiles until words emerge from the process? He does the same with numbers:

'This process of taking a sum and manipulating it in my head into meaningful number shapes and patterns that generate a solution is one I consider syntactic - analogous to how most people take a jumble of thoughts in their minds and effortlessly manipulate them mentally into a coherent, grammatical and meaningful order that they can express as a sentence. For some reason they cannot do anything like this with numbers. Most people just seem overwhelmed by large numbers and are unable to think about them in the way they think about words in a sentence. In contrast, I am able to take the numbers in a sum (…) mentally break them down into meaningful shapes (…) which I can then manipulate into a 'sentence' that is grammatical (…) in the sense that it produces the correct answer.'

Such way of thinking is amazing. It allows him, above all, to discuss 'inhibition'; the mental process by which our brains prevents its parts not performing a task to interfere with the ones performing it. If the cognitive capabilities of neurotypicals are very defined within their brains (eg some areas for various linguistic skills, other for mathematical skills, others again for various sensory perceptions...) his, like other people with savant syndrome and, to a certain extend, synaesthesia or even autism, are not. It's an amazing outlook, those consequence serve to nail a point which need to be nailed again and again: the variety of human brains is such, that it's an asset to humanity as much as biodiversity is to ecology.

Here's a deeply human book besides being a great introduction to the human brain. You may or not think he is loosing track in the last few chapters, where he discusses how our brains fare in our contemporary societies (eg debunking various logical and statistical fallacies, and questioning the overload of informations constantly bombarding us with truly negative effects... - I personally found that welcomed). But, there's no denying this is a very informative read. It might have been too light for me (again, since I have a personal interest in most of the topics discussed, I haven't learnt much) yet it was entertaining and engaging throughout. A really good book! show less

Here's a fascinating insight into a baffling mind! To be autistic is rare enough. To have synaesthesia is rare too. To have savant syndrome is even rarer. Well, Daniel Tammet combines all three! More, unlike most individuals with savant syndrome -who usually are so challenged in other cognitive areas that they are dependent for their care- he is perfectly independent; and so fully able to tell about his experience. 'Born on a Blue Day' truly is an extraordinary book.

Starting by reminiscing show more upon his childhood, it's touching and moving to see him growing up surrounded by people who have absolutely no clue. Asperger wasn't recognised as a unique disorder before 1994, and so here we are, watching upon this little boy making his way through a childhood unlike any others. As with every autobiography, this is a unique personal history for sure. Yet, it echoes with the experiences of many; and when it comes to people like me (so-called 'neurotypicals') he blows away some prejudices still well ingrained among the general population. Autistic people are not loners by choice, they crave friendships and relationships as everyone does; it's their perceived weirdness which doesn't help, and so they often end up lonely by default. Autistic people are not 'retard', they hate being patronised as much as everyone else. Autistic people are also perfectly able to contribute greatly to society (he went on volunteering in Lithuania in his early twenties; and he works - unlike many others on the spectrum, sadly still left behind on the job market...). He was lucky though, in that his family was very loving, nurturing, supportive. As he acknowledges himself, his (numerous!) siblings have done wonders for improving his social skills; like, later on, his long term boyfriend will do wonders to help him connecting with his emotions.

No matter how moving and interesting, though, his family and love story is not what glued me to this read. His mind did.

Following epileptic seizures in childhood (nasty ones, we're talking here about status epilepticus...) his brain was completely reprogramed (for default of a better word) into acquiring amazing skills. Not only does he have synaesthesia, but, he developed a gift for numbers and languages. A visual mind is not unusual for autistic people. The thing with him is that he sees numbers in shapes, colours, textures, and motions! Same with words: he pictures them each with an associated colour. Beyond that, his ability to thus visualise words and numbers as he does allows him to arrange and re-arrange them mentally, merging them altogether, in such a way that he can perform unimaginable calculations. Added to an extraordinary memory for everything related to numeracy (eg dates...) here's a fascinating mind to delve into! Fluent in ten languages, he learnt Icelandic in about a week! He also holds the record for reciting the mathematical constant pi from memory to 22,514 decimal places (a feat that took him more than five hours to perform!).

Not every autistic individual is the same, and, savant syndrome is extremely rare. His autobiography is therefore unique for many reasons. However, despite his 'differentness' (as he calls it) Daniel Tammet's memoir is both touching and compelling. Touching, because being yet another voice from Asperger's his experience has to be discovered for anyone curious about how possible it is to differently perceive the world around. Compelling, because such insight into synaesthesia and savant syndrome make for a engrossing read for whoever is intrigued by how weird the human brain can be. In the end, you cannot but feel admirative in front of a such a person. Remarkable! show less

As the subtitle says this book is about a high-functioning person on the autism disorder spectrum. But what the title doesn't explicitly say is that the autistic person wrote the book himself. As such it is a fascinating look into how a person with autism thinks and feels.

Daniel Tammet is British, born to working-class people as the eldest of nine children. He early on demonstrated his autistic tendencies, preferring to spend time alone in his room over playing with his siblings or other show more children. He also displayed an early fascination with numbers. He has synaesthesia which means that numbers and words have unique shapes, colours and textures when he thinks of them. This perhaps explains his incredible memory for numbers. He holds the world record for reciting the digits of pi, a total of 22,514 digits in 5 hours and 9 minutes. He is also incredibly adept at learning languages. He knows 10 languages and once learned Icelandic in a week. At the same time he has all the emotional difficulties of a person with autism and he frankly talks about them.

Truly fascinating. show less