There’s a fine line between psychiatry and genius
Daniel Tammet has Asperger syndrome, a form of autism coupled with high intelligence. He also has Savant syndrome which is generally characterised by excellence in one skill. Tammet has, however, unprecedented mathematical and language talents. In 2004 he set a record by faultlessly reciting from memory 22,514 decimal places of the number pi in five hours and nine minutes. He learned the series of numbers in just three months.Autistic people often think in images, an ability called synesthesia. Tammet has this ability too, for example he sees Wednesday, his birthday on January 31, 1979, as blue, and so the title of his book becomes clear: Born on a Blue Day.
For Tammet, letters and numbers have colours. He sees numbers not only in colour, but also in different forms and sizes: he can recognise every prime number up to 9,973 by its crystal form. When I spent a few days with him just before the publication of the Dutch translation of his book, Tammet told me proudly that he now also paints. “What are you painting?” I asked with interest. “The number pi,” he answered. He sees series of numbers, like the decimals of the number pi, as mountainous landscapes.
Unusual combination
Synesthesia involves intensified fibre connections between the different regions of the cerebral cortex which enables the cerebral cortex area that normally only deals with sight to receive information about calculations. Difficult calculations suddenly become easy when they are translated into images. But Tammet is also capable of learning a new language in one week, for example the extremely difficult Icelandic language.
This combination is unusual, but what makes Daniel Tammet a unique Savant are his great social skills which are almost always absent in people with this syndrome. Thus in his book he can talk in a touching manner about his loneliness as a child, how much he would have liked to have friends but was shut out for being different. And about the many fears he dealt with as a child by thinking of numbers, because he considered them his only true friends.
He describes his obsessive need for order and regularity which he has never outgrown. Every day he weighs 45 grams of porridge and drinks one cup of tea at exactly the same moment of the day, otherwise he becomes anxious . These are all the characteristics of Asperger syndrome and have never before been expressed so sympathetically.
Moving story
What makes his book so fascinating is the personal, moving story about what a child with these talents misses, how difficult his development is, how he manages step by step to overcome his lack of social skills to ultimately grow into a complete, independent adult man.
Tammet earns a living by offering language courses on the internet. Communication through the internet is much easier for autistic people than personal contact.
Some years ago actor Dustin Hoffman effectively highlighted the problems of autism in the film Rain Man which was inspired by the Savant Kim Peek. Meeting Peek was a high point in Daniel Tammet’s life. The meeting took place as part of a BBC documentary in which Tammet tried to earn money by counting cards in Las Vegas – just as the autistic man in Rain Man. At first he lost enormous sums, but then he started trusting his instincts. By following his intuition he made the correct choices, and won again and again.
Brain man
After the documentary, Tammet became known as ‘Brain Man’, certainly a tribute to his phenomenal cognitive capacities, but the nickname does not touch on his most unusual aspect, namely how he overcame his many handicaps with great insight and courage to become a socially well-functioning and extraordinarily sympathetic Savant.
When reading Tammet’s book, you are continuously confronted with the hazy boundaries between normal functioning and psychiatry, and you wonder how closely related Savants are to geniuses who were never labelled as having the Asperger or Savant syndromes. Picasso had great difficulty learning to read and write and do sums. Einstein’s language development was slow and he used mental images to solve difficult physics problems. The boundary between psychiatry and the possession of great gifts is often a fine line, and depends on what the environment labels it.
