Daniel Tammet
Daniel Tammet
Daniel Tammet FRSAis an English writer, essayist, translator, and autistic savant. His 2006 memoir, Born on a Blue Day, about his life with Asperger syndrome and savant syndrome, was named a "Best Book for Young Adults" in 2008 by the American Library Association Young Adult Library Services magazine. His second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France's best-selling books of 2009. Thinking in Numbers, his third book, was published on 16 August 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton in...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionYoung Adult Author
Date of Birth31 January 1979
What I do find surprising is that other people do not think in the same way. I find it hard to imagine a world where numbers and words are not how I experience them!
When things don't come so naturally to you, you want to persevere, you want to keep pushing yourself to overcome obstacles that prevent you from having the kind of life that you want to have.
Every culture has contributed to maths just as it has contributed to literature. It's a universal language; numbers belong to everyone.
Life is going to be complex, and the only way we're able navigate our way through it at all is by living as best we can and absorbing those experiences and somehow making intuitive responses in future situations that resemble them in some way.
I recited Pi to 22,514 decimal points in five hours and nine minutes. I was able to do this because of weeks of study, aided by the unusual synaesthesic way my mind perceives numbers as complex multidimensional coloured and textured shapes.
I know from my own experience that there is much more to 'intelligence' than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness of one person's mind, or meaningfully describe the nature of his or her potential.
I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.
37 is a lumpy number, a bit like porridge. Six is very small and dark and cold, and whenever I was little trying to understand what sadness is I would imagine myself inside a number six and having that experience of cold and darkness. Similarly, number four is a shy number.
We will always have more to discover, more to invent, more to understand and that's much closer to art and literature than any science.
It was hard for me to find my voice because I was, for so long, absorbed in my own world.
I'm not sure I'm the only savant with high IQ or with an above average IQ. Again, it may just be that we don't know very many of the others.
Logic obviously is important. You need to be able to figure things out, to go to the end of a particular problem. But intuition is very important because it references things that logic alone cannot.