Daniel Tammet is a savant with synesthesia, an unusual crosstalk in the mind.
Like Shakespeare or Nobokov weaving evocative metaphor from cognitive associations, Daniel can navigate numbers and language with amazing power.
On a dare, he taught himself the Icelandic language in a week.
And he recited 22,514 digits of Pi, which is like memorizing a random string of digits for most people.
He’s the one I wanted to speak with at the party… =)
And it got even more interesting, moonwalking with Einstein.
Seeing my last name, he praised the beauty of the vowel-rich Estonian language. He did not like the associations of his birth name (Corney) and so he changed it to Tammet, which means “tree” in Estonian. This fit better with the way he sees himself.
For Tammet, each integer up to 10,000 has a unique shape, colour, texture and feel. He can see the results of calculations as landscapes and can sense whether a number is prime. 25 is energetic, the “kind of number you would invite to a party.” (examples below)
Memorizing Pi was like walking through a 3D tapestry of colors and shapes, a “rolling numerical landscape.” He told my Dad that it would be like a mental stroll through his garden. It is not that hard to remember what you see. And yes, it’s just as easy to walk the other way. So he could recite Pi in reverse as well.
Pi is beautiful to him, and so he can instantly spot a single flipped digit across thousands as an ugly scar in his beautiful landscape.
When he recited Pi to over 22 thousand digits, it took a bit over five hours, and he says he was limited by fatigue not memory capacity. The organizers of the event were most impressed by his ability to stop for a drink of water at every 1000 digits without being told the time had come.
While numbers have color and shape, words have color and emotion. So he does not form the same landscapes with text, but he does have a more evocative experience with certain strings of words. “Nabokov was synaesthetic!” he exclaims. Tammet sees harmonious colors in his writings, like a string of purple words with melancholy associations.
He was familiar with Ramachandran’s work studying synesthesia: “The brain did not evolve to represent numbers, but it did evolve to represent space. Cardinality maps onto space.”
I was reminded of my first reaction to meeting Ramachandran:
The mastery of evocative metaphor, in written or visual form, seems like a touch of synaesthesia to me. Great artists can tap into their internal cross talk, and synaesthesia is the extreme example of what might lie along a spectrum from rationalist to artiste.
It also seems that young children are better at this than the average adult. Given the 10x reduction in synaptic connections at the age of 2 to 3 years, perhaps the benefits of crosstalk are lost in the carvings of maturity.
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