Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
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Authors: Daniel Tammet
Born on a Blue Day
A Memoir of Asperger’s and an Extraordinary Mind
Daniel Tammet
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Hodder and Stoughton
An Hachette UK Company
Copyright © 2006 by Daniel Tammet
The right of Daniel Tammet to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Epub ISBN: 9781444717310
Book ISBN: 9780340899755
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
An Hachette UK company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Dr Darold Treffert
Foreword by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen
1: Blue Nines and Red Words
2: Early Years
3: Struck by Lightning: Epilepsy
4: Schooldays
5: Odd One Out
6: Adolescence
7: Ticket to Kaunas
8: Falling in Love
9: The Gift of Tongues
To my parents,
for helping me become the person I am today
and to Neil,
for always being there for me
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people, without whom this book would never have been possible:
My parents, Jennifer and Kevin, for all their love and patience and for all that they have taught me
My brothers Lee, Steven and Paul and sisters Claire, Maria, Natasha, Anna-Marie and Shelley, for their love and understanding
Rehan Qayoom – my best friend from my schooldays
Elfriede Corkhill – my favourite schoolteacher
Ian and Elaine Moore, Ian and Ana Williams and Olly and Ash Jeffery – my closest friends
Birut
Ziliene – the person I think of when I remember my time in Lithuania
Sigridur Kristinsdóttir – my Icelandic tutor
Suzy Seraphine-Kimel and Julien Chaumon – for all their help with the Optimnem.co.uk website
Martin, Steve, Toby, Dan and Nicola – the team behind the
Brainman
documentary
Andrew Lownie, my literary agent; Rowena Webb, Helen Coyle and Kerry Hood at Hodder for all their help and advice with the book
Finally my partner Neil, for being himself
Foreword by Dr Darold Treffert
This is a concise book about a very expansive mind. But it is a book not just about the
mind
of Daniel Tammet, but a book about his
world
as well. And both are worthy of exploration.
Daniel’s phenomenal ability with numbers is incredible. If you ask him to multiply 37 to the power of 4 he will give you almost instantly the total of 1,874,161. Ask him to divide 13 by 97 and he will give you the answer to over 100 decimal places if you wish. He out-distances the ordinary calculator instantly and without effort. You’ll need a computer to see if he is correct. And of course he is correct. Then there is his ability to learn an entire new language – grammar, inflection and comprehension in only one week. The documentary Brainman, first broadcast in the U.K. in 2005, charts Daniel’s mastery of Icelandic in such a brief time, culminating in a live interview on television using his newly acquired language in a sprightly interaction with his Icelandic TV hosts.
Of special interest for me, though, is not just what Daniel can so extraordinarily do, but rather his capacity to describe how he does it. Such first-person explanations of savant abilities are extremely rare, in fact nearly non-existent. Most books are written by others about the special abilities some people have, rather than having been written by the person who has those special skills. Daniel, uniquely, provides an exceptionally insightful account of his mental capacities. This description can now be correlated with imaging studies and other neuropsychological tests, some already underway, thereby providing a rare opportunity to explore more fully the elusive, “how do they do it?” question.
But other things are of interest as well. Daniel’s synaesthesia, which he describes so richly, is unique in that he ‘sees’ individual numbers – each one up to 10,000 – not just as a single colour, but also as a shape, a colour, a texture, a motion and sometimes even an emotional ‘tone’. When he does his massive calculations he literally ‘sees’ the answer in his head, not written out in number form as in a telephone book, but rather as a confluence of these shapes and colours and forms into an ‘answer’ experienced in a newly coalesced shape, form and colour.
Daniel tells us that his synaesthesia began after a series of childhood epileptic seizures. This, for me, puts him into the “acquired” savant category – people who develop savant-like abilities, sometimes at a prodigious level, following some central nervous system trauma, disease or disorder. The “acquired” savant raises important questions about hidden potential, perhaps, dormant within us all, and about how to tap that potential without traumatic event. By studying Daniel more closely – something he is very willing to participate in – we may come closer to being able to tap the “little Rainman” that exists, perhaps, within us all.
Daniel has also been given a diagnosis of high functioning autism, or Asperger’s Disorder as well, a condition he writes openly about. In contrast to the more prominent symptoms and behaviours he displayed as a child, though, his present very high level of functioning underscores his observation that he has “outgrown” some of his autism. Such progress does occur, fortunately, in some other people on the autistic spectrum, as they grow older. Daniel’s part progress has created in him a heartfelt life mission – to serve as an inspiration for other people, whether with epilepsy or Asperger’s, demonstrating by his own example that such conditions need not always interfere with overall development and potential. His mission statement is an empathic one – to make the world a “more welcome place” for people with such disabilities.
I met Daniel for the first time at the Milwaukee Art Museum with its dramatic architecture, rich colours and striking imagery. It was the perfect setting. A towering sculpture with a multitude of glass pieces, of all shapes, sizes and colours, helped me visualise, in a concrete sense, some of the vivid thought imagery that Daniel was describing to me verbally.
In person Daniel is articulate, soft-spoken, pleasant, polite, gentle and modest. Those traits shine through in his writing as well. His plans for the future include continuing to help charities such as the National Autistic Society and the National Society for Epilepsy. His celebrity-status gives him a good podium worldwide from which to carry out that admirable goal. He also wants to continue to work with scientists to study his special abilities in greater detail. And he wants to promote different ways of learning, particularly visual learning, which is so often so important in better understanding, and then teaching, people with autistic spectrum disorders.
At a very personal level his goals mirror those of most of us – becoming closer in our relationships with partners, family and friends. He also wants to seek, and relish, those too few, but precious moments of peace and contentment that he describes in the closing paragraphs of his book. Those are ‘heavenly’ moments.
Daniel says that numbers are his friends. Indeed in his early childhood they seemed to be his only friends. But now Daniel is seeking out and making new friends – literally all over the world. Friendship is reciprocal though. And one comes away from his book – or at least I did – with the feeling, through his openness, candor and reaching out, of having made a new friend as well.
Darold A. Treffert, M.D.
Scientific adviser on the film
Rainman
Foreword by
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen
“How rare is it to have synaesthesia? It occurs in less than 1% of the population. And how rare is it to have an autism spectrum condition? Again, less than 1% of the population has such a condition. In Daniel Tammet, these two states co-occur and if we assume they are independent, the probability of someone having both synaesthesia and autism is vanishingly small – about 1 in 10,000. In this, his first book, Daniel tells ‘with engaging detail’ the story of his life, from his childhood when he always felt he was an outsider, to his adulthood, when among many other extraordinary achievements, he sets a British and European record for reciting the mathematical constant Pi from memory, to 22,514 decimal places. His other gifts include acquiring foreign languages with ease, and even having constructed his own language. Are his talents the result of his two rare syndromes coming together in one person? His synaesthesia gives him a richly textured, multi-sensory form of memory, and his autism gives him the narrow focus on number and syntactic patterns. The resulting book is a story of a life that is both remarkable and inspiring.”
Simon Baron-Cohen
Director, Autism Research Centre
Cambridge University
1
Blue Nines and Red Words