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 fifth part (see parts I, II, III, IV, VI, postscript), Daniel talks about creativity, the mind, brain, intuition, late bloomers, the genetics of homosexuality, love, and the effects of the modern information age on how we see the world.
S. I was really fascinated by your hyper connectivity theory of creativity. There are a lot of theories of creativity in the field of creativity but I found yours quite unique amongst the theories out there. Could you please summarize briefly your theory of creativity?
D. Sure. Of course creativity is a mystery. We don't know what drives it or what constitutes it. It's one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it's impossible to define. In my own experience doing the research I did for Embracing the Wide Sky, I saw many examples of creativity within the autistic spectrum. This intrigued me because I had read that scientists had up until very recently believed that autism and creativity didn't go together- that it was kind of an oxymoron to imagine that someone could be a creative person with autism. And that isn't the case.
When you have a brain that has developed differently then of course there will be parts of the brain - perhaps those parts that deal with social interaction and so-on- that develop in such a way that impinges on the person. That's part of the cost that I was talking about. But one can easily imagine in the same way that in other parts of the brain, parts that deal with language or numbers or memory and so on that there is a development that actually enhances those abilities.
My theory is that the connectivity that we see in pretty much every young child up until perhaps the age of five or six- where the brain in essence overdevelops the connections between the cells and then quite literally prunes them back to prevent information overload, psychosis, and so on to make the activity in each separate part of the brain as efficient as possible- perhaps that pruning back doesn't take place or doesn't take place in the same way for the those on the autistic spectrum. And that hyper connectivity is what drives creativity, because it allows the person to draw information and ideas and emotions and experiences simultaneously from different parts of the brain and therefore not to rely so much on categorization of skills, or of ideas and so-on in a way that most people do. Being able to make those kinds of unusual leaps between one idea and another or between one emotion or image or experience and another, most people would agree is a characteristic of creativity. So that strikes me as a very plausible theory.
S. You've argued that your numerical abilities are the result of this abnormal cross communication between the number and the language regions of your brain. In your book you write that for most people, the left parietal lobe which processes numbers and the left frontal lobe which processes language are indeed next to each other in the left hemisphere. So do you think the two areas communicate more in your brain than in "normal" brains?
D. Yes. That's the theory.
S. Okay.
D. That is again a reference to the hyper connectivity theory, which says that creativity is the result of increased activity, an unusual communication between regions of the brain that are normally kept separate. What I am suggesting, and it's my best guess, of course I can't know for sure, is that those regions of the brain that are normally close together, are clearly very active in my brain, seeing that I speak many languages, I am a reasonably good writer, write poetry and have a great sensibility for language for as long as I remember and had this ability for numbers and calculation and memory as well. But is there perhaps some kind of symbiosis going on between these two regions that would explain the hyper activity in both? That would make it easy to imagine that these regions are capable of that much amount of hyper activity.
One explanation would be that the numbers part is maybe feeding into the language part, or the language part into the numbers part. And so what I suggest is that the way that I visualize numbers, in particular, has clear analogies with language and how people use language. That when we say words like giraffe, for example, we visualize a giraffe. We don't sound it out in our minds according to the syllables or spell it out according to the individual letters. We take it as a whole. We visualize it as a whole. We don't pick out the ears and the nose and the neck and so on, we can just visualize it as a whole instantly taking all of the different constituent parts and drawing them in together into that particular example.
And in a sense, that's what I'm doing with numbers. When I have a number in front of me, and I am able to visualize it, I am essentially assuming the number is it's composite, and visualizing the constituent parts, the prime factors and each of their shapes and colors and textures is forming a whole in the same way that the torso and the nose, the neck, and the spots and so on is making the image of a giraffe in our mind.
