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"Born On A Blue Day: A Memoir" - Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Fri 09 Mar 2007 03:33 AM PST  

Born On A Blue Day: A Memoir

Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

Born On A Blue Day book cover

A Memoir of Asperger's and an Extraordinary Mind

by Daniel Tammet

"Daniel sees numbers as shapes, colours and textures and can perform extraordinary maths in his head. He can also learn to speak a language fluently from scratch in a week. He has Savant Syndrome, an extremely rare form of Asperger's that gives him almost unimaginable mental powers, much like the Rain Man portrayed by Dustin Hoffman. ..."

left quoteOf 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.right quote 

- Dr. Darold Treffert, scientific advisor on the Rain Man movie

"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 result is a story of a life that is both remarkable and inspiring."


- Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director Autism Research Centre,

Cambridge University, England


Optimnem: The Official Website of Daniel Tammet

Daniel Tammet is a high-functioning autistic savant. He can calculate huge sums in his head in seconds and instantaneously recognise prime numbers, but he finds emotions difficult to understand and has trouble telling left from right. One of fewer than fifty such people living worldwide, Daniel is unique in his ability to articulate his savant experience.

He describes his visual experience of numbers as complex synaesthetic shapes with colour, texture and motion. Thirty-seven is lumpy like porridge, while eighty-nine reminds him of falling snow. Sequences of digits form visual landscapes in his mind.

In March 2004, Daniel set a European record when he recited the famous mathematical constant Pi from memory to 22,514 decimal places in a time of 5 hours. He has been extensively studied by scientists at California's Center for Brain Studies and at the Cambridge Autism Research Centre UK and has been described as autism's 'Rosetta Stone'. ...

"In a way, one might say Tammet has come back from the country of autism, which is a very difficult place for researchers and for parents to reach."  - ABC News, June 2005


Brainman

Science Channel Documentary on Daniel

Many people learnt of Daniel for the first time through the award-winning documentary 'Brainman' (titled 'The Boy With The Incredible Brain' in the UK). Filmed in 2004, it shows Daniel reciting the famous mathematical constant Pi from memory to 22,514 digits - a European record - before travelling to the United States to be studied by brain scientists in California, beat the house at blackjack in Las Vegas and meet the original 'Rain Man' Kim Peek in Salt Lake City. Daniel is also given the challenge to learn a new language - Icelandic - from scratch in just seven days, before an interview in Reykjavik entirely in the home language.

The documentary won a Royal Television Society award in December 2005 and was nominated for a BAFTA in 2006. It has sold in more than 40 countries worldwide.



Wisconsin Medical Society

The academy-award-winning film Rain Man brought national — indeed, international — attention to the Savant Syndrome condition. But since it was first described a century ago, the phenomenon of the savant — the juxtapositions of severe mental handicap and prodigious mental ability — has remained unexplained.

Darold A. Treffert, MD, past-president of the Wisconsin Medical Society and psychiatrist at St. Agnes Hospital in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, has studied the syndrome for years. He is the author of the book, Extraordinary People: Understanding the Savant Syndrome, which chronicles case studies of Savant Syndrome patients. He also was a consultant to the movie Rain Man. On this web site he describes the condition, reviews and summarizes the world literature on this topic since the early reports, describes more recent cases, and catalogs and categorizes savant abilities. He also provides a bibliography for references, and profiles of savant syndrome patients.

EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE: Understanding Savant Syndrome by Dr. Treffert has now been re-issued, with an epilogue update, by iuniverse.com through an arrangement with Author's Guild backinprint.com. The book is available through the www.iuniverse.com web site, Barnes and Noble.com at www.bn.com, and amazon.com.


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