Brain Man

Daniel Tammet's cred as a savant remains unchallenged. He once recited Pi to 22,514 places before an audience of Pi-verifiers. He did it in over five hours without a single slip-up.

Thanks to Digg I also learned that Daniel Tammet suffers only minimally from the normally socially crippling symptoms of Savant Syndrome. Affable and lucid, Tammet cogently explains his thought processes, revealing in this interview with Morley Safer that to him numbers are highly synethetic, appearing like colorful, textured landscapes.

"I see numbers in my head as colors and shapes and textures. So when I see a long sequence, the sequence forms landscapes in my mind," Tammet explains. "Every number up to 10,000, I can visualize in this way, has its own color, has its own shape, has its own texture."

For example, when Daniel says he sees Pi, he does those instant computations, he is not calculating, but says the answer simply appears to him as a landscape of colorful shapes.

"The shapes aren't static. They're full of color. They're full of texture. In a sense, they're full of life," he says.

Finally a first-person account from these "raw mentats" (c'mon, you hardcore Herbert fans, name that reference).

We may also have an answer to the cause of Savant Syndrome: brain injury. Dr. V.S. Ramachandran of the California Center for Brain Study says, "One possibility is that many other parts of the brain are functioning abnormally or sub-normally. And this allows the patient to allocate all his attentional resources to the one remaining part," he explains. "And there's a lot of clinical evidence for this. Some patients have a stroke and suddenly, their artistic skills improve."

Daniel Tammet suffered a massive epileptic seizure at age four, and he recalls developing his synesthesia afterwards.