The Boy With The Incredible Brain – Daniel Tammet

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Daniel Tammet

As a baby, Daniel Tammet cried constantly and banged his head against the wall. His parents were frantic but all doctors could suggest was that he was under-stimulated. One afternoon when he was four, an accident changed the way Daniel thought forever. While playing with his brother in the living room he suffered a series of epileptic seizures which transformed his brain chemistry, giving him the gift of synaesthesia.

This condition occurs when the parts of the brain responsible for different areas of perception get mixed up. Brain scans of autistic savants suggest that the right hemisphere might be compensating for damage in the left hemisphere. While many savants struggle with language and comprehension – skills associated primarily with the left hemisphere – they often have amazing skills in mathematics and memory – primarily right hemisphere skills.

Daniel began to respond emotionally to numbers, which he started to see as complex, beautiful shapes and textures.

Tammet set a European record on March 14th 2004 when he recited the famous mathematical constant Pi (3.141…) to 22,514 decimal places from memory in a time of 5 hours, 9 minutes. His remarkable memory, mathematical and linguistic abilities have been studied by some of the world’s leading neuroscientists at California’s Center for Brain Studies and the UK’s Cambridge Autism Research Centre.

His new book, ‘Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind’, is a personal and scientific exploration of how the brain works and the differences and similarities between savant and non-savant minds.

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Image credit: http://www.optimnem.co.uk/about.php