Daniel Tammet: Biography Of The Savant Mathematician
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder whose clinical expression can be very disabling; since it presents with cognitive, communicative and behavioral alterations. Furthermore, all of them frequently coexist with some degree of intellectual disability.
In a small percentage of cases, those who suffer from it (generally men) live with the aforementioned difficulty but also with some extraordinarily developed capacity. Those who present this combination are known as savant (savant syndrome).
In this disorder, the person usually maintains their verbal ability, which is why they are considered high-functioning autism (Asperger’s in the DSM-IV-TR diagnostic manual). In fact, there are many who have the ability to learn multiple languages effortlessly and in record time.
In this article we will address the figure of Daniel Tammet, one of these rare savant His case is extremely particular, since his extraordinary aptitude is oriented towards both mathematics and languages.
Daniel Tammet is a British mathematician born in 1979, who was identified at age 25 as a savant by the prestigious Simon Baron-Cohen, professor at the University of Cambridge. This is an exceptional case of a prodigious savant, of which only a few dozen have been documented throughout the world, and which is characterized by the extraordinary development of more than one cognitive function along with the preservation of intelligence (which often exceeds the upper limits of normality).
He grew up in London and is the first of nine children, coming from a humble British family that for years was forced to subsist on the charity of acquaintances and charitable associations. His childhood was not only marked by the social limitations of autism, but also by the emergence of other serious pathologies (such as epilepsy) that persistently changed the way in which he thought and processed his reality.
Much has been written about his life and work, despite the fact that at this moment he is still a very young person. For many years he has been visiting different universities in both Europe and North America, sharing his experiences with hundreds of students and giving faithful testimony to his divergent thinking. Several documentaries have also been filmed and broadcast about him on television, emphasizing his life and the particular way in which his childhood brain developed.
Getting to know Daniel Tammet means discovering the specific way his mind works. Therefore, we will proceed to discuss the issue from now on, focusing especially on a key concept for its understanding: synesthesia.
The birth of Daniel Tammet was quite an event for his parents, as he was the first of many other children who would come later. The economic situation they were going through was not the best, but they harbored a vibrant desire to enter the stage of parenthood, so it was a gratifying and long-awaited event for this young couple. However, they would soon be surprised that his son seemed to cry incessantly, and that he did not respond to his attempts to alleviate the grief that apparently overwhelmed him.
This circumstance arose from practically the first moment he came into the world, and meant periodic visits to Pediatric specialists. This was undoubtedly an early sign of her autism, although she could not be diagnosed by doctors at the time. It is necessary to consider that at twelve months he had developed the expected motor milestones and was formulating his first words, something that did not fit the way in which this disorder was conceived at that time (limited to Leo Kanner’s criteria).
Little Daniel Tammet’s recreational activities lacked any symbolic aspect, and by the time he entered kindergarten he tended to withdraw into a solitary space and display behaviors that his teachers would judge as repetitive and without apparent purpose. He spent many hours frolicking in a sandbox on the center’s playground, absorbed in each of the grains that slipped between his tiny fingers. The rest of the children were only the background for his restrictive interests, so he did not notice their presence.
Also at that time he expressed self-stimulating behaviors such as gently banging his head against the wall of his house or daycare, as well as swinging rhythmically when he felt happy or cheerful. During this chapter of his life, a certain rigidity developed in his way of acting, since he could not use cutlery other than his own or hang his coat on a rack other than the one he had assigned to himself at school.
His younger brothers, who were gradually coming into the world, were not a reason for joy or interest for him. Although he came to share a room with quite a few of them over the years, Daniel Tammet always seemed to feel distant from the life that the rest of the family built together, showing a very notable preference for solitude (looking through books with brightly colored drawings or simply looking at the way the white light of the sun shattered into a thousand colors as it passed through the crystalline prism of your window).
When he was barely two years old, Daniel Tammet experienced an event that would change his life forever. While he was at home he suffered an epileptic seizure, with a focus of activity located in the temporal lobe of the left cerebral hemisphere This is a more common problem in children with autism than in the general population, but it was a serious setback that almost cost him his life.
The hospital stay lasted several days. After the corresponding examination, carbamazepine (an anticonvulsant drug) was prescribed and a grand mal epileptic seizure was diagnosed that had restricted the supply of oxygen (since he already had cyanotic lips in the emergency room). The accident could have marked a before and after in the way in which Daniel Tammet processed information. Luckily that was his first and his last attack, but something had changed forever in a deep corner of his nervous system.
3. An extraordinary ability for numbers
The studies that have been carried out to date regarding the way the brains of people with savant syndrome work indicate that A lesion in the temporal region of the left hemisphere could be the basis of neuroplastic changes aimed at the right hemisphere assuming greater control of the situation Although the exact mechanism is largely unknown, it seems that this triggers novel ways of articulating neurological processes that translate into a superlative development of compensatory cognitive functions.
In this sense, Daniel Tammet began to live with synesthesia. It is a rare symptom that consists of the perception of a specific stimulus in a sensory modality different from that which would correspond to it due to its physical properties (such as seeing sounds or hearing objects). In this specific case, the phenomenon would especially involve numbers, in such a particular way that it was (from that moment until today) the foundation for an extraordinary capacity for arithmetic calculation and mathematical reasoning.
Daniel Tammet is able to assign completely unique physical properties to each number, differentiating them from each other. Thus, some would be very big (like nine) and others would be tiny (like six). There would also be elegant ones (like three) and full of edges (four). He even distinguishes the numbers according to the way their surface feels to the touch, being rough and smooth. In this way, each number awakens a totally different series of emotions in him.
It is important to note that this ability is not limited only to simple numbers, but rather to all possible numbers in the known universe. For example, 333 would seem pretty to you, while 289 might be unpleasant (to look at, hear, or touch). His favorite numbers would be prime numbers (which can only be divided by themselves or by unity), as they would feel as smooth as the “polished pebbles of a stream.” He would also find those with decimals nice, to the point that today he holds the European record for reciting pi (with 22,514 digits).
All of these sensations contribute to the ability to make mathematical calculations that are impossible for ordinary mortals, since it carries out a concatenation of mental operations (fusion, dissolution, etc.) in which all the physical properties that it assigns to numbers participate. In this way he “feels” them even before having calculated them, recognizing and pronouncing them within a landscape that he himself is capable of generating inside his head.
4. Exceptional verbal ability
Daniel Tammet, in addition to being a mathematical genius, He is fluent in eleven different languages (and has even designed his own one known as Mänty), of which his favorite is Estonian (due to its richness in vowels). And his synesthetic ability also extends to the words themselves, to which he attributes properties (color, sound, etc.) according to the way in which his graphemes are organized. In this way, a word can completely change its feeling when a suffix or prefix is added.
This skill also originated in Tammet’s childhood, as there was a specific period in which he wrote compulsively on rolls of paper. The activity kept him away from reality for hours, and for him it was a very rich stimulus full of nuances to delight in. There is an anecdote about how in his adult life he learned to speak Finnish in just seven days, with the aim of passing a test that was prepared for him for a documentary in which he starred.
He currently teaches language classes and has a website dedicated to this purpose. His literary production is also very important, since to date he has written or collaborated on a total of six works: Born on a blue day (2006), Embracing the wide sky (2009), Islands of geniuses (prologue, 2010), Thinking in numbers (2012), C’est une chose sérieuse que d’être parmi les hommes (2014) and The conquest of the brain (2017).
