Daniel Tammet is talking. As he
talks, he studies my shirt and counts the stitches. Ever since the age of
three, when he suffered an epileptic fit, Tammet has been obsessed with
counting. Now he is 26, and a mathematical genius who can figure out cube roots
quicker than a calculator and recall pi to 22,514 decimal places. He also
happens to be autistic, which is why he can't drive a car, wire a plug, or tell
right from left. He lives with extraordinary ability and disability.
Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied
by 795. Actually, he isn't "calculating": there is nothing conscious
about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic
fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colors and textures. The number
two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. "When I
multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and
evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's
like maths without having to think."
Tammet is a "savant", an individual
with an astonishing, extraordinary mental ability. An estimated 10% of the
autistic population - and an estimated 1% of the non-autistic population - have
savant abilities, but no one knows exactly why. A number of scientists now hope
that Tammet might help us to understand better. Professor Allan Snyder, from
the Centre for the Mind at the Australian National University in Canberra,
explains why Tammet is of particular, and international, scientific interest.
"Savants can't usually tell us how they do what they do," says
Snyder. "It just comes to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in
his head. That's why he's exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone." There
are many theories about savants. Snyder, for instance, believes that we all
possess the savant's extraordinary abilities - it is just a question of us
learning how to access them. "Savants have usually had some kind of brain
damage. Whether it's an onset of dementia later in life, a blow to the head or,
in the case of Daniel, an epileptic fit. And it's that brain damage which
creates the savant. I think that it's possible for a perfectly normal person to
have access to these abilities, so working with Daniel could be very
instructive." Scans of the brains of autistic savants suggest that the right hemisphere might be compensating for damage in the left hemisphere. While many savants struggle with language and comprehension (skills associated primarily with the left hemisphere), they often have amazing skills in mathematics and memory (primarily right hemisphere skills). Typically, savants have a limited vocabulary, but there is nothing limited about Tammet's vocabulary.
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