Born on a Blue Day Offers Entry into a Savant's Mind

Honestly, who isn't fascinated by savants? Everyone dreams of discovering they have some amazing, superhero-like powers, and savants come closer to living that dream than almost anyone else.

Daniel Tammet seems particularly more blessed than ordinary mortals. He is a savant with Asperger Syndrome (AS). In his autobiography, Born on a Blue Day, he lets us in on what it's like to live inside his superpowered brain. He describes in detail his synaesthetic relationship with numbers, and how this aids his phenomenal memory. He is perhaps most famous for his record-setting recitation of pi to 22,514 digits in one sitting, as a fundraising event for the UK's National Society for Epilepsy. When describing his trip to the US for the filming of the documentary Brainman, he talks about some of the tests specialists did with him to try to understand his unique mental processes. As one of the highest functioning savants known, many researchers consider Daniel an important key to understanding these amazing brain functions.

His most fascinated talent to me, though, is his facility with learning languages. He speaks some 10 languages fluently, including one he created on his own. (Believe me, constructing a functional language system is harder than it may seem.) For the last part of the Brainman documentary, he was sent to Iceland to learn Icelandic, determined to be one of the most complex languages the producers could find, in less than a week! And yet, as Daniel describes it, it is clear he managed to take this challenge in stride, too. He now runs his own website, where he writes online language-learning courses. Basically, he has the very superpower I wish I had. (Alas, to date, I can only speak Spanish passably and Japanese moderately-poorly.)

Like any superhero, Daniel does have his weaknesses. He talks about the problems he has faced with social interactions, with inflexibility with regard to routines, with learning to drive, and other typical issues many people with AS deal with every day. But he has managed to cope with them all, and indeed seems quite happy with who he is, AS, savant syndrome, and all.

Daniel covers a lot more of the details of his life in the book, such as his childhood epilepsy, and his relationship with his partner, much more than I can go into here, and I can't recommend the book enough. A fascinating, and fast, read.

Daniel has been featured by The Guardian, the New York Times, and 60 Minutes.