Daniel Tammet: biography of the mathematical savant

Autism it is a neurodevelopmental disorder whose clinical expression can be very disabling; since it presents with cognitive, communicative and behavioral alterations. In addition, 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 (sage syndrome).

In this disorder, the person usually maintains his verbal ability, which is why they are considered high-functioning autism (Asperger in the DSM-IV-TR diagnostic manual). In fact, not a few 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 tremendously particular, since his extraordinary aptitude is oriented both to mathematics and to languages.

Who is Daniel Tammet?

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. It is an exceptional case of a prodigious sage, of which only a few dozen have been documented throughout the world, and is characterized by the extraordinary development of more than one cognitive function together with the preservation of intelligence (which often exceeds the upper limits of the normal).

He grew up in London and is the first of nine children, from a humble British family that for years was forced to subsist on charity from acquaintances and charities. 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 he thought and processed his reality.

A lot 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 both in Europe and North America, sharing his experiences with hundreds of students and giving a faithful testimony of his thinking divergent. Various documentaries about him have also been filmed and broadcast on television, emphasizing his life and the particular way in which his childhood brain developed.

Meeting Daniel Tammet implies discovering the concrete way in which his mind works. For this reason, we will proceed to deal with the matter in the following, especially dwelling on a key concept for its understanding: synesthesia.

1. The firsts years

The birth of Daniel Tammet was an event for his parents, as he was the first of many other children to come later. The economic situation they were going through was not the best, but they harbored a vibrant longing to enter the stage of parenthood, so it was a rewarding and expected event for this young woman partner. 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 in which he arrived in the world, and entailed periodic visits to specialists in Pediatrics. It was undoubtedly an early sign of his autism, although it could not be diagnosed by the doctors of the time. It is necessary to consider that at twelve months he had developed the planned motor milestones and formulated his first words, something that did not fit the way this disorder was conceived at that time (limited to the criteria of Leo Kanner).

The playful activities of little Daniel Tammet lacked any symbolic aspectBy the time he entered kindergarten, he tended to withdraw into a lonely space and display behaviors that his teachers would judge as repetitive and without apparent purpose. He spent countless hours frolicking in a sandbox on the playground at this center, absorbed in every single grain that slipped through his tiny fingers. The rest of the children were only the background for his restrictive interests, so he did not notice his presence.

Also at that time he expressed self-stimulating behaviors such as gently tapping the head against the wall of your home or nursery, as well as swaying rhythmically at the moment when you felt happy or joyful. During this chapter of his life he developed a certain rigidity in his way of acting, since he could not use cutlery other than his own or hang the coat on a rack other than the one he had assigned to himself in the school.

His younger siblings, who were progressively reaching the world, did not suppose for him a reason for joy or interest. Despite the fact that he came to share a room with quite a few of them over the years, Daniel Tammet always seemed to feel distant from him. the life that the rest of the family built together, showing a very notable preference for solitude (looking at books with pictures of living colors or just looking at the way the white light from the sun shattered into a thousand colors as it passed through the crystalline prism of your window).

2. An unexpected event

When he was barely two years old, Daniel Tammet experienced an event that would change his life forever. While she was at his house, she suffered an epileptic seizure, with a focus of activity located in the temporal lobe of the left cerebral hemisphere.. It 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.

Hospital admission lasted several days. After the corresponding examination, he was prescribed carbamazepine (an anticonvulsant drug) and a seizure was diagnosed epileptic of great evil that had come to restrict the supply of oxygen (because already in the emergency room she presented cyanotics). The accident could have been a before and after in the way 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 in which 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 to assume greater control of the situation. Although the exact mechanism is largely unknown, it appears to trigger novel forms of articulate neurological processes that result in a superlative development of cognitive functions compensatory.

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 modality sensory 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 involve numbers very especially, in such a particular way that it now and to the present day) the foundation for an extraordinary capacity for arithmetic calculation and reasoning mathematical.

Daniel Tammet is able to assign totally unique physical properties to each number, differentiating them from one another. Thus, some would be very large (such as nine) and others tiny (such as six). He would also have them elegant (like the three) and full of edges (the four). He even goes so far as to distinguish numbers according to the way their surface feels to the touch, being rough and smooth. In this way, each number awakens in him a totally different series of emotions.

It is important to note that this ability is not limited only to simple numbers, but to all possible numbers in the known universe. For example, 333 would look pretty to you, while 289 might be unpleasant (to the eye, to the ear, or to the touch). His preferred numbers would be the cousins ​​(which can only be divided by themselves or by unity), as he would feel them 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 the recitation of pi (with 22,514 digits).

All these sensations contribute to his being able to make mathematical calculations impossible for ordinary mortals, since he performs a concatenation of mental operations (fusion, dissolution, etc.) in which all the physical properties that he assigns to the numbers. In this way he "feels" them even before he has calculated them, recognizing them 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 genius of mathematics, he is fluent in eleven different languages ​​(and has even designed one of his own known as Mänty), of which his favorite is Estonian (for the richness in vowels). And it is that his synaesthetic 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 to it.

This ability also originated in Tammet's childhood, as there was a particular period when he compulsively wrote on scrolls of paper. The activity kept him away from reality for hours, and for him it was a very rich stimulus and full of nuances among which to delight. 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 dedicated website for this purpose. His literary production is also very important, since to date he has written or collaborated in 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).

Bibliographic references:

• Hughes, J., Ward, J., Gruffydd, D., Baron-Cohen, S., Smith, P., Alison, C. and Simner, J. (2018). Savant syndrome has a distinct psychological profile in autism. Molecular Autism, 9:53.
• Treffert, D.A. (2009). The savant syndrome: an extraordinary condition. A synopsis: past, present and future. Philosophical Transactions B, 363 (1522), 1351-1357.