Daniel Tammet
Daniel Tammet
Daniel Tammet FRSAis an English writer, essayist, translator, and autistic savant. His 2006 memoir, Born on a Blue Day, about his life with Asperger syndrome and savant syndrome, was named a "Best Book for Young Adults" in 2008 by the American Library Association Young Adult Library Services magazine. His second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France's best-selling books of 2009. Thinking in Numbers, his third book, was published on 16 August 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton in...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionYoung Adult Author
Date of Birth31 January 1979
There are estimated to be fewer that 50 prodigious savants worldwide. If we were brought together, it would be disappointing in the sense of us having different abilities. One thing that would make me feel united with them would be the sense of us having grown up in isolation.
Often autism is portrayed in the media as a very negative condition, as something that prevents somebody from communicating or from socializing or from being able to have any kind of normal, happy life.
Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.
I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so many years I've almost lost my accent.
Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, 'Chess is life.' I would say, 'Pi is life.'
There is no such thing as an average person. They really are guidelines for people to grapple with the unknown, and we can always surprise expectations.
I have never played the lottery in my life and never will. Voltaire described lotteries as a tax on stupidity. More specifically, I think, on innumeracy.
I did have a very restricted, regimented life. There was a kind of happiness there, a contentment, but it was a small happiness within very clear and delineated borders.
I certainly have routines in my day-to-day life that are important to me and still give me feelings of security and control, but the capacity to break out of them every so often as I travel has given me a second wind.
Logic obviously is important. You need to be able to figure things out, to go to the end of a particular problem. But intuition is very important because it references things that logic alone cannot.
I'm not sure I'm the only savant with high IQ or with an above average IQ. Again, it may just be that we don't know very many of the others.
It was hard for me to find my voice because I was, for so long, absorbed in my own world.
37 is a lumpy number, a bit like porridge. Six is very small and dark and cold, and whenever I was little trying to understand what sadness is I would imagine myself inside a number six and having that experience of cold and darkness. Similarly, number four is a shy number.
I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.