Different ways of knowing Daniel Tammet

I’m a savant or more precisely a

high-functioning autistic savant it’s a

rare condition and very still when

accompanied as in my case by

self-awareness and a mastery of language

very often when I meet someone and they

learn this about me there’s a certain

kind of awkwardness I can see it in

their eyes

they want to ask me something and in the

end quite often the urge is stronger

than they are and they blurt it out if I

give you my date of birth can you tell

me what day of the week I was born on or

they mentioned kyboots or asked me to

recite a long number a long text I hope

you’ll forgive me if I don’t perform a

kind of one-man savant show for you

today

I I’m going to talk instead about

something far more interesting then

dates of birth for kyboots a little

deeper and a lot closer to my mind and

work I want to talk to you briefly about

perception when he was writing the plays

and the short stories that would make

his name Anton Chekov keptin a book in

which he noted down his observations of

the world around him

little details that other people seemed

to miss every time I read Chekov and his

unique vision of human life I’m reminded

of why I too became a writer in my books

I explore a nature of perception and how

different kinds of perceiving create

different kinds of knowing and

understanding

here are three questions drawn for my

work ravelin tried to figure them out

I’m going to ask you to consider for a

moment the intuitions and the gut

instincts that are going through your

head and your heart as you look at them

for example the calculation can you feel

where on a number line the solution is

likely to fall or look at the foreign

word and the sounds can you get a sense

of the range of meanings that it’s

pointing you towards and in terms of the

line of poetry why does the poet use the

word hare larval and rabbit I’m asking

you to do this because I believe that

our personal perceptions you see are at

the heart of how we acquire knowledge

aesthetic judgments larval and abstract

reasoning guide and shape the process by

which we all come to know what we know

I’m an extreme example of this my worlds

of words and numbers elaire with color

emotion and personality as one said it’s

the condition that scientists call

synesthesia unusual crosstalk between

the senses

here are the numbers 1 to 12 as I see

them every number with its own shape and

character one is a flash of white light

6 is a tiny and very sad black hole the

sketch is I’m black and white here but

in my mind they have colors 3 is green

for his blue 5 is yellow I paint as well

and here is one of my paintings it’s a

multiplication of two prime numbers

three-dimensional shapes and the space

they create in the middle creates a new

shape the answer to the sum what about

bigger numbers well you can’t get much

bigger than pi the mathematical constant

it’s an infinite number literally goes

on forever in this painting that I made

of the first 20 decimals of pi I take

the colors and emotions and the textures

and I pull them all together into a kind

of rolling numerical landscape but it’s

not only numbers that I see in colors

word - for me have colors and emotions

and textures and this is an opening

phrase from the novel Lolita and the

barkoff was himself synesthetic and you

can see here how my perception of the

sound l helps the alliteration to jump

right out another example a little bit

more mathematical and I wonder if some

of you will notice the construction of

the sentence from The Great Gatsby there

is a procession of syllables wheat one

for Aries - lost sweet towns three one

two three and this effect is very

pleasant on the mind

and it helps the sentient to feel light

let’s go back to the questions I posed

your moments ago 64 x 75 there’s some of

you played chess you’ll know that 64 is

a square number and that’s why chess

boards 8 by 8 have 64 squares so that

gives us a form that we can picture that

we can perceive what about 75

well if a hundred if we think of a

hundred as of being a like a square 75

would look like this so what we need to

do now is put those two pictures

together in our mind something like this

64 becomes 6400 and in the right hand

corner you don’t have to calculate

anything for a cross for up and down

it’s 16 so what the sum is actually

asking you to do is 16 16 16 that’s a

lot easier than the way that a school

taught you to do maths I’m sure it’s 16

16 16 48 4800 4800 the answer to the sum

easier when you know how

the second question was an Icelandic

word I’m assuming or not many people

here who speak Icelandic so let me

narrow the choices down to two New

Guinea is it a happy word or sad word

what do you say okay some people say

it’s happy

most people a majority of people say sad

and

it does she mean sad why do

statistically a majority of people say

that a word is sad in this case heavy

and other cases in my theory language

evolves in such a way that sounds

match correspond with the subjective

with the personal intuitive experience

of the listener let’s have a look at the

the third question it’s a line from a

poem by John Keats

words like numbers Express fundamental

relationships between objects and events

and forces that constitute our world it

stands to reason that we existing in

this world should in the course of our

lives absorb intuitively those

relationships and poets like other

artists play with those intuitive

understandings in the case of hair it’s

an ambiguous sound in English it can

also mean the fibers that grow from our

head and if we think of that and we put

the picture up the fibers represent

vulnerability they yield to the

slightest movement or motion or with

emotion so what you have is an

atmosphere of vulnerability and tension

the hair itself the animal not too cat

not a dog a hair wire hair because think

of the picture not the word the picture

the over long ears the over large feet

helps us to picture to feel intuitively

what it means to limp and to tremble so

in these few minutes I hope I’ve been

able to share a little bit of my vision

of things and to show you that words can

have colors and emotions numbers shapes

and personalities the world is richer

vaster then it too often seems to be

I hope that I’ve given you the desire to

learn to see the world with new eyes

thank you

you