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