Autism – a Mark of the Genius?

Daniel Paul Tammet started to do huge calculations when he was only four years old. He said he would calculate numbers which result in nearly a hundred decimal places well beyond the capacity of some computers which could only go as far as 32 decimal places. When he is doing calculations he says he sees the numbers in terms of pictures, shapes and patterns. He seems to be doing mathematics without having to think at all.

Daniel took a bid to remember pie up to 22,500 decimal places and to recite it during a live transmission on TV with invigilators checking his recitation. Pie is a circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. It is a number with no pattern and goes on to infinite. Two hours later Daniel started the recitation, he was barely half way through and the whole recitation took him 5 hours and 9 minutes.

When Daniel was a small child he used to have a series of seizures. Probably these experiences changed his brain as he started to see images formed in his mind and intuitively perceive patterns between numbers.

Such people are known as savant. The notion has become popular following the movie called Rain Man in which Justin Hoffman was acting as a gifted misfit. Most savants lack social skills and the link with autism appears to be quite strong.

The Cambridge scientist Professor Simon Baron - Cohen said, "Autism is a spectrum of medical conditions where people have a lot of difficulty in forming social relationships and to put themselves in other people’s shoes, to imagine other people's emotions and feelings. It is also where the individual develop strong narrow interests, obsessions and like to do things in a repetitive way. So it is a mix of ability and disability"

However, Daniel seems to have only the ability and not any obvious disability.

His mother recalls Daniel's constant crying up until the age of two and he would only calm down when he was made swinging in a blanket, which marked the necessity of repetitive movements that are the classic sign of autism, according to Prof. Baron-Cohen.

He didn't integrate well with the other kids playing around when he was at school, confining himself to counting numbers or sometimes looking up the trees observing the shapes of the leaves. "Numbers are like the most real things for me," he said. As a child he was much more comfortable with the world of numbers than people.

By most measures Daniel was autistic as a child but also managed to pick up the social skills to blend in with others. May be he is lucky since such ability usually comes with severe mental handcap as part of the prize.

"The one criteria that was missing to warrant a diagnosis is that his symptoms are not interfering with his current life," said Prof. Baron–Cohen.

The shapes of numbers

For Daniel numbers have different shapes and colors, texture forms and landscapes. For example one is like bright flash light and number two is like a movement drifting from right to left. He could hardly have a definite shape that describes number 6 so he says it is like a blackhole. Number 9 can be quite intimidating for him.  In such a way he recognizes every number up to 10 thousand having a distinct shape and color.

This may be explained by the phenomenon of cross activation that may possibly occur between the neighboring areas of the brain that deals with numbers and the other with shapes and texture. Scientists call this phenomenon Synesthesia.

What Daniel can accomplish can be learned as is the case of the application of the ancient art of the abacus in Tokyo. At the age of 12 and after eight years of practice students can demonstrate jaw dropping results. Some students can calculate huge numbers using just imaginary abacus by merely manipulating thin air.

But Daniel says he is not doing this kind of conscious mental calculation at all. For him the answers come automatically in a form of mental imagery.

At the San Diego Center for Brain Studies in California, Professor V. S. Ramachandran and his team put Daniel's ability to the test. Professor Ramachandran tested Daniel to make his mental images and asked him to do the same the following day and found out that the shapes of each number have remarkable similarities even though they are not exactly the same.

But they are still to prove if Daniel actually has emotional response to certain numbers as he claims. Thus, they tested him using the number pie, which he says is so beautiful, by randomly inserting such number as 6 which Daniel doesn't like.

With the help of galvanized skin detector, they were able to see the sudden jolts in the readings of the machine reflecting his emotional response to the numbers. Daniel later described that something was wrong with the numbers as some of the shapes and patterns are missing from his mental landscape of the number pie.

Learning a new language in just seven days

Daniel already knows nine languages and he says he can learn a new one just in one week.

Hence, he was flown to Island for the ultimate challenge of learning a new language in just 7 days. The Islandic language even the locals say is confusing and unpronouncable.

As planned, Daniel completed his week-long studies of the language and went on a live interview which the interviewer later on witnessed with amusement that Daniel was able to speak the language intelligibly using good grammatical patterns of the language.

Such talent as Daniel has is extremely rare. "The line between profound talent and profound disability seems surprisingly thin one," says Daniel.

Den Bottino was not as lucky as his amazing ability in drawing since he was a toddler came with a severe mental disability as his language and social skills remain childlike. He enjoys drawing in the sand at a beach as the water comes and washes away his drawings which he quickly draws time and again.

Some other people seem to develop similar brain capacity after some serious injury happened to their head. After his baseball injury to his head when he was ten years old,  Orlando L. Serrell has started to recall the days of the week and the weather ever since his accident.

Dr. Darold Treffert who spent years studying the Rain Man phenomenon of unique mental capacity estimated that there are fewer than 50 such people in the world and Daniel's ability is indeed spectacular. He said, "The bigger question is whether we all have such ability within us. That is what I would refer to as the little Rain Man within us." And he added, "Savant syndrome is challenging us to think in new ways about intelligence and what intelligence is."

Source: https://youtu.be/PPySn3slfXI 

The Power of Human Brain - what is the limit?

Can you calculate the following numbers in your brain without the aid of calculators or adding machines?

37,691 × 37,691 = ?????

Did you succeed? If so, how long did it take you? Can you do it faster than you can do using a calculator?

Well, someone can just do that. He is Arthur Benjamin, who calls himself a 'mathemagician'. But is it really a magic, or one of the many possibilities the human brain is capable of attaining?

In his entertaining and fascinating TEDtalk speech, he demonstrated the jaw dropping capacity of his brain, or possibly that of the human beings, in what he says is the result of the fusion of his passions for mathes and magic.

He takes up two digit numbers he randomly receives from the audience and multiples them faster than the calculators the three individuals picked up from the audience use to compute the given numbers. He has actually shown to multiple two digit numbers faster than those three individuals could do using the short cut method to square a given number in their calculators. He had no difficulty doing the same even using three digit numbers.

In fact, he appeared to struggle a little bit when he was calculating the square of four digit numbers, but corrected his own mistake immediately. For me, this makes him more human and may validate the amazing power of his brain to be more of a human capability than some magical wonder beyond the realms of the potential of the average human beings.


Arthur makes his demonstration more entertain and even trickier when he takes up the challenge to multiply the three digit number with any four digit numbers. He would exactly tell the missing number when the three individuals do the multiplication using their calculators and tell him the resulting six or seven digit numbers in any order they like leaving out one of the digits for him to fill in. He made no mistakes in any of the three attempts. The chances of getting just all of these three attempts right by pure guessing is one in one thousand, he noted. He is also proud to point out that most of the calculators can not go beyond calculating five digit numbers which can only be done with some latest calculators.

In addition to computations, he proves the power of his amazing brain to tell the day of the week of their birth when some of the people in the audience tell him the year, month and the date they were born. He has even shown his capability to name the day of the week between 1600 years in the past and 3000 years into the future as much as the modern day app can help us confirm. Hence, it was not very difficult for him to tell that 13 June 2730 will fall on Friday.

Towards the end of his demonstration, Aurther explained how he does his wonders of computation by actually thinking loud as he multiples the square of five digit numbers resulting in ten digit numbers. He said he uses certain words as mnemonic devices to temporarily store the numbers he is multiplying to be able to retrieve them later and complete his computation. He actually declares that there is definately a method to his amazing power of calculation, which probably shows that his capability in computation is a learn behaviour than something which magically happens to him. This probably confirms that other human beings can also possibily learn his techniques and do all the wonders he has been able to demonstrate.

In his final demonstration, Arther admits that there may be 50% chance for him to make a mistake but doesn't want to be told his mistakes before he himself has the chance to correct them. But actually he did no mistake, and he finished his fascinating and entertaining demonstration with a big finish leaving the audience applauding to him in awe, and probably with something like this lingering in their mind, "Well, I can not definitely do the same."

But can't you?

What we remember and why we forget?

The woman who is poor at forgetting

Jill Price, a 40 years old school administrator, never forgets everything that happened in her life for more than three decades in the past. She still feels bad about things that happened 30 years ago and it is not just one or two things but a lot of them that happened on many different days in the past.

This, she says, makes her life emotionally difficult at times. She suffered depression over the years as she recalls and regrets the fact that if something had not happened first something else would not have happened later in her life. She consulted doctors, psychologists and therapists and nobody could help her.

Dr. James Almendorf, a distinguished professor of neurobiology at the University of California, studies how strong memories are made. He closely examined Jill Price's case for several years.

Jill still remembers the date when she first met Dr. Almendorf on June 5, 2000 which was Monday and when he called her on June 12 and set an appointment to meet on June 24. For 37 years Dr. Almendorf’s assistant has kept records of his daily activities which confirmed the accuracy of Jill's recollections.

In his first encounter with her, he asked her among other things when the Iranian hostage crisis situation started and she answered confidently. At first he thought she was wrong and later he found out she was indeed right.

A similar situation also happened on another occasion when the journalist Diane Sawyer asked her in an interview the date on which Princes Grace died. Jill assuredly answered that it was September 14, 1982. And she still remembers that it was Tuesday, her first day in grade 12. Diane checked the records and found that her answer was wrong. The record showed that it was on September 10 of the same year. Upon Jill's insistence, the producers looked for the information in online sources and announced that the book was actually wrong and of course Jill got it right.

Jill is hundred percent certain about her recollections because she just is as she declares it. But she doesn’t know or say how she has been able to recall with such degree of accuracy.

When she was asked how she could know whether it was a Monday or some other day her answer is "because I just do".

Dr. Almendorf said, "We know almost nothing about the causes of forgetting. That is a big blackhole in scientific research. We know an awful lot about the conditions which create memories. We know very little about what happens when people forget."

He described Jill's situation as she is poor at forgetting.

Jill said, "When somebody in the science world took me seriously, I am thrilled with that and you have no idea."

And the reason is how another scientist called Gary Marcus, professor of psychology from New York University, explained Jill's case in an article in Wired magazine as obsession with recalling past events, which actually upset her a great deal.

Professor Marcus thought her memory is not fundamentally different from any other person. The only difference appears to him that she obsessively recalls the facts of her life and reflects about them.

According to him, what drive Jill to have such a good memory are not so much the memory circuits of her brain but the drive that pushes her to remember something. He compares her “unconscious compulsion about memory” with drug addiction referring to the 50 thousand pages diaries she wrote.

For Jill, this is just crap. She merely wrote her diaries to deal with her insatiable memory of past events, and not because she wants to keep the memories alive. She said she never read them once she wrote the diaries. Therefore, she was greatly offended by Professor Marcus’ explanation. She is worried that people who read the article may think of her case as simplistic OCD of the brain.

She responds, "I am not just a brain. I have a heart and I have soul. There are a lot of complexities that go along with it." To make her situation so simplistic like that was what really offended Jill the most.

Dr Almendorf disagreed with Marcus' explanation and asked how much of these subtle rehearsing one has to do in order to have a strong memory of something that happened 20 years ago, which is still so strong and readily and quickly available.

"She does not have perfect memory,” Dr. Almendorf said. “She doesn't remember everything. But what she remembers, she does not forget."

After Jill was presented on the worlwide television, ten other people with the same ability appeared. One of them is the 20 year old British named Aurelien Hayman who claimed to have such power of memory since he was just four years old.

To find out more, follow the link below:

Source: The boy who can't forget (Medical documentary) - Real Stories
https://youtu.be/9Bnu0UrgxBg