A Beautiful Mind - Daniel Tammet

The Smartest Guy in the World

I came across Daniel's story on youtube. The Boy With The Incredible Brain (Superhuman Documentary) - Real Stories by Little Dot Studios a series comprising over 300 factual documentaries all about incredible true stories ranging from hard hitting current affairs to crime and of course, some incredible people.

An EXTRAordinary Young Man

Daniel is a seemingly normal (and quite humble) guy from East London, near to where I live. He's one of nine children from an otherwise ordinary family and the only thing that really set him apart as a child is that he cried all the time as a baby. At school he was really interested in numbers and patterns and would find himself lost in observing the leaves on the trees. In his own words "even the bullies didn't know what to do with me", so they left him alone, thankfully.

What Makes him So Special ?

From a very young age, Daniel could solve very complex maths in his head. Daniel lives for numbers and has some extraordinary capabilities, but he doesn't rely on memory tricks to perform calculations or indeed perform calculations at all. He has a visual and emotional relationship with maths and answers come to him from deep within his mind. (Or you could say from deep within the Universe itself but I'll touch on that later.) Daniel sees numbers as a landscape and each number up to 10,000 has, for him, a different shape, feel, colour and texture. He can multiply a two digit number to the power of 4 or 7 which is really quite astounding. For example this is what it looks like. Most people would likely make a mistake just entering this on a calculator. 34x34x34x34x34x34x34x34 = 52,523,350,144. That isn't just incredible. It's off the scale of what humans can ordinarily do and there probably isn't another human being alive who can do it.

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Not Rain Man

What's also really special about Daniel from a scientific perspective is that appears as a very normal & well adjusted young man. He can easily describe what's going on inside his head, so unlike many other savants (people with extraordinary mental abilities) he can work with researchers to uncover why his mind is different. Many savant people have severe disabilities including autism, which can affect their ability to integrate into the everyday world and while Daniel has been tested by Simon Baron Cohen Professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and found to possess commonattributes associated with autism, including a love of numbers and patterns, he is socially normal (and I think from watching him talk, a very cool and interesting guy). He might come across as a bit geeky to some people; as you'd expect of a genius, but he's got a very deep and beautiful mind and if you listen to him talk, he does seem to have a profound sense of the uniqueness of his own gift and is apparently more interested in exploring it than exploiting it. (Genius)

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A Love of Pi

Who doesn't love a bit of pie ? I like apple, preferably with a touch of crumble and fresh cream, but Daniel is very fond of the mathematical pi; The number π is a mathematical constant. Originally defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, it now has various equivalent definitions src wiki and produces infinite decimal places. Daniel sees Pi like a landscape. He experiences maths as a visual experience and it's thought that he may have a severe (and very fortuitous) form of synaesthesia where senses overlap in areas of the brain and get mixed up. thought to be, in Daniel's case, as a result of childhood epilepsy. Scientists are baffled by his apparent spontaneous answers. He recalls no working out or memorisation. He simply sees an image in response to a question and it becomes clearer until he can read it off as digits. He talks about mountains and valleys in landscapes, something which as a visual artist, I find fascinating. I also have an emotional relationship to creating music and for me certain sounds embody different emotions, creating feeling or progression of states of emotion. (that's the same for most of us) but for Daniel, he experiences a range of emotions in relationship to numbers. His ability to recall Pi, flawlessly to thousands of decimal places is also unheard of. It's incredibly fascinating and I think probably unmatched. Most people would struggle to remember 10 places, but Daniel can reel off 10,000 without a mistake ??? A team of checkers is required just to adjudicate his recital.

Language Skills

Many savants have a narrow focus on photographic memory or certain mathematicla abilities. Daniel is rare in this respect. He also has a gift for language. He speaks nine languages and can learn a new one in about one week. This is again, quite extraordinary and seems to be intimately related somehow to his vastly superior calculating skill but as we already know, language is quite different from maths. It is not usual for someone to possess both superpowers at once. This is where my Sci-fi imagination kicks in. I see in Daniel the classic sci-fi form of an evolved or advanced being. Perhaps if we want to know what it would be like to be from a superior civilisation whose inhabitants are vastly more capable than ourselves, (or our future selves) then Daniel's abilities may give us a glimpse through a window into a world where he's just exhibiting routine skill and he's just an average kid in a world containing it's own genius people, who are on an even higher level of capability.

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Another advanced species may, for example have synaesthetic brains as standard. It makes me think of the film version of The Man Who Fell to Earth starring a young David Bowie who learns to speak human languages from watching tv as if it's just a dialect. It's a classic spaceman theme and one which suggests higher innate ability...like Daniel's. In The Man Who Fell to Earth; which is based on a brilliant book about one alien man's journey to Earth in search of water for his dying planet. Being hugely advanced, (like Daniel) he develops a series of industrial patents in an attempt to gather the resources to build a big spaceship to transport him and the water home. The inference is that his knowledge of maths and physics is way beyond our norm. In this story however, he becomes (all too human); depressed, alcoholic, and weak. I digress, but to look at Daniel, I think is this the possible future of humanity, when super intelligent people will have inherent maths and language capabilities like him. It's a tantalising thought. I'm not saying Daniel's from Outer Space, just imagine what a world if everyone had his level of ability and not that maths and language are everything,... far from it, but they do provide fascinating and profound insights into the world around us, within us and outside of us and one another, respectively. We need to study people like Daniel very carefully, for he is a gift to humanity and within his beautiful and unique mind lies many untold secrets about the Universe, life and Everything. 42 it is not.