Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant: A Memoir by Daniel Tammet. Free Press, $24, 226 pages.

The News & Observer

February 25, 2007

Brain man

By PHILLIP MANNING

'Numbers," writes Daniel Tammet, "are my friends, and they are always around me. ... The number 11 is friendly and 5 is loud, whereas 4 is both shy and quiet." To Tammet, numbers have shapes, textures, colors and personalities. The number 6, for instance, is dark and hollow, while another number is recognized by its smooth surface.

This fascinating numerical landscape enables him to manipulate huge numbers easily and quickly in his mind. When multiplying two numbers, he concentrates on their shapes until a third image -- the answer -- appears. The process is unconscious and fast. Tammet can spit out the answer to 37 X 37 X 37 X 37 X 37 in a matter of seconds. (For those without Tammet's knack, the answer is 69,343,957.)

In this remarkable, revealing and nearly flawless memoir, Tammet takes us into a world that is as distant from ours as the Earth is from the stars. The author has synesthesia, a rare neurological condition that couples different senses, which is why he experiences numbers as shapes and colors. He also has Asperger Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism that affects about 1 in 300 people. "Single-mindedness is a defining characteristic [of people with Asperger Syndrome]," Tammet writes, "as is a strong drive to analyze detail and identify rules and patterns in systems."

Autistic savants like Tammet have always attracted interest. But their thought processes have remained obscure because few possess the self-awareness and literary gifts to articulate their inner lives. In "Born on a Blue Day," Tammet offers a clear look into his mind.

Tammet, who lives in Kent, England, is a man of unvarying habits. For example, he always brushes his teeth for precisely two minutes and washes his face with exactly five splashes of water. Many people with Asperger are very good with numbers and languages and at memorizing things. They are not so good with people.

Tammet remembers an amazing number of details. From his first days in a London nursery school, he can recall the texture of the floor, the colors of the toys, and the type of mat at the bottom of the sliding board. But he has no memory at all of the other children. "To me," he confesses, "they were the background." To this day, people scare him, confuse him, make him nervous.

But this clearly written, good-natured memoir suggests that he is comfortable interacting with others through prose. I have only two quibbles with the book: Tammet's eye for detail occasionally leads to mundane, overly long recitations of lists. When he prepares for a trip, for instance, he tells us that he packed "one coat, two pairs of shoes, four sweaters ...." and so on, through 11 pairs of socks, essential oils and shampoo. Although such litanies reveal how his mind works, they are wearying.

More serious is his failure to clearly define terms. How does Asperger Syndrome differ from high-functioning autism? Exactly what is an autistic savant? Where does synesthesia fit in? And do any of these conditions relate to a epileptic seizure Tammet experienced as a young boy and describes in detail in the book? Admittedly, these are overlapping, imprecise terms with few firmly established connections, but Tammet could have done more to steer us through them.

For years, Tammet, like many others with autism, knew he was different from other people. He despaired about fitting in and wondered if he would ever be able to live an independent, productive life. He knew that Kim Peak, his hero and the real-life inspiration for the Dustin Hoffman character in the movie "Rain Man," has someone with him at all times to help him navigate through daily life. And although autistic savants' feats of mental calculations are amazing, they are not in high demand as job skills. Obtaining employment is a huge hurdle for them. Tammet says that only about 12 percent of those with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome hold full-time jobs.

But Tammet gradually learned the ways of the world. By the time he interviewed for a position as a volunteer teacher in the English equivalent of the Peace Corps, he had outgrown his habit of taking everything people said literally. So when the receptionist asked him "to take a seat," he knew "not to pick up one of the seats in the waiting area and take it with me" but to sit down. He got the job and spent the next year teaching English in Lithuania.

The liberating year in a new country helped Tammet understand who he was. He joined the gay community and used his savant-given language skills to learn Lithuanian. Later, for a television program, he learned one of the most difficult of languages, Icelandic, in less than two weeks. Today, Tammet can converse in 10 languages and has started a Web-based business that offers courses in foreign languages.

But his most impressive feat had nothing to do with languages. One day at Oxford University, after boning up for three months, Tammet began speaking, reeling off number after number: 3-point-1-4-1-5-9 .... Five hours later he was done. He had recited 22,514 digits of the number pi without error, setting a European record.

However, feats such as this or learning languages in a fortnight or being able to calculate the day Henry VIII was born from his date of birth are only parlor tricks, albeit astounding parlor tricks. Tammet knows that memorizing the digits of pi does not make you a mathematician or scientist any more than fluency with languages makes you a linguistics scholar. Nonetheless, Tammet is making a significant contribution to science. Because he can articulate his thought processes, he is crucially important to scientists who are trying to understand how the human brain works.

Tammet has allowed neuroscientists to examine him, quiz him, inspect him. This is not easy for someone as sensitive to his environment and as dependent on routine as he is. Nevertheless, he puts up with the poking and prodding to help scientists understand the mind of an high-functioning autistic savant. He does this, in part, because he believes their research will help others with his condition. But this research could also lead to a deeper understanding of the human brain, possibly pointing the way to better treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Tammet's willingness to be a guinea pig for brain science is a far more important part of the productive life he wants to lead than his mathematical gymnastics or flair with languages.
####