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."
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