Although their unusual abilities compel considerable attention, there are fewer than 100 known prodigious savants living at the present time. Daniel Tammet is one of them. Over 30 years, the London-born mathematical and language whiz has transformed from an awkward, reclusive boy into a confident adult. His quiet, private life of strict routines gave way in 2006, when his memoir Born on a Blue Day became a best-seller, necessitating travel, self-promotion, and talk show appearances. His latest book, Embracing the Wide Sky, is a scientific exploration of his extraordinary abilities (reciting pi to 22,514 places, learning to speak Icelandic in a week) and a tour of autism.
On August 18th and August 19th, 2009, Daniel was gracious enough to let me peer into his world. I was aware of the great number of interviews with Daniel that already exist, but as a psychologist, I still had many lingering questions, which Daniel was very patient in answering for me. These two days, I left my prior expectations, biases, and ways of thinking at the door and transported myself into Daniel's mind. As a result, I was fortunate enough to be able to share his unique way of seeing the world.
Daniel's insights changed my own way of thinking, not only with regards to Autism and Asperger's syndrome, but also in terms of the full extent to which personal change is possible, the nature and nurture of individual differences, intelligence, creativity, genius, fiction, art, poetry, math, love, relationships, the mind, brain, the future of humanity, and the appreciation of many different kinds of minds. A portion of my interview can be found in the November/December issue of Psychology Today (Numbers Guy: An autistic savant joins the wider world). .
Over the coming days I will reveal my complete interview with Daniel, laid out in six parts. I hope you find Daniel's reflections, insights, and ongoing journey just as fascinating and thought-provoking as I have.
In this second part (see parts I, III, IV, V, VI, postscript), Daniel talks about how his mind works.
S. I'm quite impressed that in 2004 you recited pi from memory to 22,514 decimal places. How did you train for this event? Did you spend all your time consciously memorizing the pi landscape? Did you at any point do any actual calculations of pi in your head? Or were you memorizing the digits of pi from a print out and then associating the numbers with the visual imagery and reading off the landscape during the actual event?
D. Yes, that was an exercise in memory, in the way that I visualize sequences of numbers and shapes, and how those shapes in turn integrate into something like a numerical landscape. Calculation would be impossible, it would be far more difficult than memorizing the numbers as far out as I did. But what I do when I memorize a number as enormous as pi, pi is an infinite number, it goes on forever, is there is an element of conscious control there because I can decide in the same way a painter decides how he's going to break up a landscape and put it on to his canvas. I can decide how I take a 10 or 20 or 30 digit number at a time and break it up. Do I break it up into intervals of 5, 5, 5, 5, 5? Or 3, or 4? Or 2 and 5 and 3 and 4? Or 5 and 4 and 2 and 1 and 5 again?
The decisions that I make would depend on the numbers themselves. So it's a very organic process. I'm looking at the numbers and deciding on their individual basis how they best go together in my mind. If a group of numbers is particularly shiny as a four-digit segment, I can group them together. And next to them, I can see that the following, say 3 digits, are very dark in my mind, then that is a particularly visually interesting or arresting image. And it would be perhaps much more easy to remember it as that, in that combination, for that reason, then to simply decide in advance to always group them in groups of 2 or 3 or 4 irrespective of the actual characteristics of the numbers themselves as they come up.
So it's a very organic process and a very involved one. It didn't take very long. In Born on a Blue Day I described the process and in Embracing the Wide Sky I go into more detail about the science of what I'm doing. I describe it as being similar in some way to music and how music gets constituted out of repetitions of smaller pieces. This is in a sense what is happening with this vast landscape, this vast symphony of numbers. The colors and the shapes and the textures are composed of smaller fragments of combinations of digits from the colors and shapes and whatever I see for each of those. And the repetitions involved, and the coherence of it all together, makes it memorable and beautiful.
I think beauty is a very important part of what I'm doing. I'm appreciating the beauty of the numbers and letting them tell me that beauty, revealed to me in front of my eyes. In Embracing the Wide Sky I describe it almost as a song that the numbers are playing for me. I think that is a useful analogy in terms of understanding it.
In terms of a time frame, in the three month time period leading up to March 14th, I spent probably every other day on average reading the print outs, and absorbing the numbers. And on those other days, I would just be doing other stuff like anyone else and just letting those numbers take shape in my mind. So it wasn't very intensive. Of course, there was a lot of work involved, in terms of reading off that many digits and then working out the best and most beautiful visualization for them and then practicing the actual recitations. The actual recitation in the end proved to be the hardest part because there was so many digits to recite. Up until the day that I actually recited them, I'd never recited them off in one go before.
I'd always just practiced in the weeks leading up to the event for maybe an hour at a time. And in that hour I'd probably be able to recite 3 or 4, or 5 thousand digits. So at that point, the other person who was having to check every digit for me, this poor sole, after the hour, it was rough. March 14th, 2004 was the first and last time that I actually recited those 22,514 digits in one go from start to finish.
S. It is remarkable. I am curious though, if you actually tried the calculation pi, could you actually do the calculation at all in your head to any digits?
D. I've never tried the calculation. I am not actually aware of the equations mathematicians use.
S. Okay.
D. I describe in the first book the history of pi, and how long in the past, before computers, there were very brave individuals who with nothing better to do with their time, with just a great love of pi as I have, decided to reckon it out for themselves and be able to do that at the rate of maybe a digit per week. And one of those mathematicians had to find 35 digits, the amount that he was able to work out in the course of his entire lifetime. The digits were put on his tombstone, a fitting epitaph.
