Daniel Tammet

© CCCB, 2017. Author: Carlos Cazurro

Daniel Tammet (1979) considers that the early numbers are above all poetic. He speaks ten languages and he loves literature. Especially poetry. And, more specifically, the poetry of numbers. For Tammet, every number up to the figure of 10,000 has its own form, colour, texture and emotion. Possibly thanks to this capacity, in 2004 he beat the European record by reciting 22,514 decimals of the number pi.

Diagnosed with Asperger’s, he also suffers from Savant syndrome, characterised by a prodigious memory, innate skills in the arts and a capacity for calculation that is almost paranormal. In addition, he is also affected by synaesthesia, which means he can listen to colours or palpate flavours. The key, in addition to having all these surprising abilities, is that he is one of the few people who know how to explain them. In Born on a Blue Day (Hodder Paperbacks, 2007), named best book of the year by the American Library Association, he relates his peculiar routines and his day-to-day life as a savant with autism, and in Embracing the Wide Sky (Hodder Paperbacks, 2009) he explains how his brain and the brains of the rest of us work. His last book is Thinking in Numbers (Hodder & Stoughton, 2012).

Update: 15/02/2017 12:00 am

http://danieltammet.net/

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