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 third part (see parts I, II, IV, V, VI, postscript), Daniel talks about the role of nature and nurture in scultping abilities.

S. What are some of your earliest memories? Did they relate to numbers?

D. Not numbers, not straightaway. I think my very earliest memory was falling down the stairs. Something as quotidian but traumatic as that, and seeing colors as I fell. And not crying out loud, not realizing that I should cry in order to bring my parents out to look after me.

And when I went to kindergarten (nursery, we would say in Britain) I would love playing with sand and taking grains of sand in the sand pit and putting them through my fingers and playing with sand timers and watching the sand slow and just experimenting with this incredibly strange, weird, but strangely beautiful thing we call reality, this world. The fact that if you take a tube and you put a ball in one side it will come out the other side. It's just an obvious thing to most people but to me growing up during early childhood it wasn't obvious that if you put a ball in one side of a tube, it will come out the other side. All these kinds of little experiments to discover the laws of how this strange but beautiful world actually worked.

S. The stairs incident, did that cause your synesthesia, or was it the seizure?

D. I don't know, I don't think so. My best guess from the research that I've done and the scientists that I've spoken to is that I would have been born with the autism and synesthesia. Some media reports state that the abilities that I have for numbers and language and so on emerged after epileptic seizures as a young child. It's certainly true that I had seizures as a young child. But my understanding in fact is that those seizures are linked to the autism and that they would not have caused the abilities that I subsequently have but they were simply, as far as I can tell, inborn. That they were always there and that the epilepsy was one of the costs in terms of being an autistic savant.

Around half of the people on the autistic spectrum will have epileptic seizures by the time they reach adolescence and that's probably to do with the differences in the development of the brain's wiring. So you have this hyper-connectivity, but also have this extra vulnerability to electrical activity in the brain which in many cases unfortunately does bring off seizures. Luckily, I grew out of those seizures.

S. You didn't have to hone the synaesthesia over the years, it always came naturally to you, right?

D. Yes, that would be a fair categorization. For as long as I can remember my mind has worked in this way. This way feels very normal and natural. Which took me a long time to realize wasn't as normal and natural I presumed it to be for other people.

S. And that also goes for the strategies that you used to remember numbers, or languages, or to do arithmetic? These strategies were always there, you didn't have to learn them, is that right?

D. The way that I approached numbers, think about them, the same as for language as well- acquiring vocabulary, understanding the grammar, the structures of languages, the rhythm, the music and so-on- these things obviously evolved. I wasn't born speaking ten languages for example. I wouldn't have been born with the ability in the cradle to multiply, to calculate numbers very quickly or to recognize a four digit or five digit or six digit prime number. But the underlying synesthesia and the hyper-connectivity and the creativity is inborn and there is good genetic evidence I think for that, as well from the studies that scientists have done with me and from my own family history-my father's schizophrenia, his father's, my grandfather's very severe epilepsy, and my brother's Asperger's syndrome like my own. Although he isn't a savant, he does have abilities I think for music and possibly for language learning, although not in the same way as I have. But that's very suggestive of the fact that there is a genetic link there.

But of course there is also environment, there's also culture. My family supported me. I wasn't hot-housed at all as a young child, I didn't go to any kind of gifted school. They didn't exist in the very poor parts of England when I grew up in the 1980s. I had a great time to learn, had access to libraries and teachers who were patient and enthusiastic when I showed ability in some subjects. So I was unlucky in some respects but I was lucky in others. But certainly there's a big gallop of talent there, which I don't think any amount of learning or repetitious practice would have got me to.