Inside the mind of an autistic savant

[n2doc]

07 January 2009 by Celeste Biever
Magazine issue 2689.

Autistic savant Daniel Tammet shot to fame when he set a European record for the number of digits of pi he recited from memory (22,514). For afters, he learned Icelandic in a week. But unlike many savants, he's able to tell us how he does it. We could all unleash extraordinary mental abilities by getting inside the savant mind, he tells Celeste Biever

Do you think savants have been misunderstood - and perhaps dehumanised - in the past?

Very often the analogy has been that a savant is like a computer, but what I do is about as far from what a computer does as you can imagine. This distinction hasn't been made before, because savants haven't been able to articulate how their minds work. I am lucky that the autism I have is mild, and that I was born into a large family and had to learn social skills, so I am able to speak up.

When did you first realise you had special talents?

At the age of 8 or 9. I was being taught maths at school and realised I could do the sums quickly, intuitively and in my own way - not using the techniques we were taught. I got so far ahead of the other children that I ran out of textbooks. I was aware already that I was different, because of my autism, but at that point I realised that the relationship I had with numbers was different.

To most people, the things you can do with your memory seem like magic. How do you do it?

The response that people often have to what I can do is one of "gee whiz", but I want to push back against that. One of the purposes of the book I've just written, Embracing the Wide Sky, is to demystify this, to show the hidden processes behind my number skills.

I have a relationship with numbers that is similar to the relationship that most people have with language. When people think of words, they don't think of them as separate items, atomised in their head, they understand them intuitively and subconsciously as belonging to an interconnected web of other words.

more:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126881.800-inside-the-mind-of-an-autistic-savant.html

[driver8]

1. Very interesting article.

It is absolutely amazing what Daniel can do

[Muttocracy]

2. nevermind - got to it in the article itself

[tinrobot]

3. For me, the ideal lumpy number is 37. It's like porridge

Best quote ever.

[Orrex]

4. Wow

Hell, it took me a whole week to learn how to pronounce Björk's last name.

And it took me two minutes to figure out how to type that "ö" just now.

[Jim__]

5. I'll have to read his book.

I'm curious as to how he thinks other people can tap into this type of thinking.

[semillama]

6. I like his concluding statement

"The abilities of savants have been pigeon-holed as somehow supernatural, almost inexplicable and certainly not as part of the natural continuum of human talent. This has deformed how the public and, crucially, scientists, view the brain and human potential. It is insulting and potentially dehumanising. The future is an immensely scary place, full of all kinds of challenges. We will need every kind of mind, so why not bring along every kind of intelligence?"

[SnowGoose]

7. My spouse is reading his book.

She's enjoying it so far, for what that's worth.

[eppur_se_muova]

8. "Born on a blue day" -- an interesting biographical read.

Especially interesting to compare w/Sacks' "Anthropologist on Mars", Grandin's "Thinking in Pictures".