Nascido em um dia azul – por dentro da mente de um autista extraordinário. Com um título intrigante e uma capa maravilhosa esse livro foi realmente muito mais do que surpreendente pra mim.

Ele começa despretensiosamente como alguém que se aproxima e tenta lhe contar uma história, depois é simplesmente impossível párar de lê-lo e você fica impressionado com as dificuldades e descobertas que um ser humano é capaz de fazer na busca de respostas para sua própria condição e “limitações”.

Daniel Tammet descreve todo seu percurso para compreender o mundo ao seu redor, desde a descoberta do autismo à ataques de epilepsia. Portador da sindrome de savant e asperger, Daniel tem dificuldades de relacionamento, de compreensão de frases de duplo sentido, de captar as nuances emocionais do comportamento humano, além de ter suas habilidades motoras comprometidas.

Apesar dessas limitações, ele tem um altíssimo poder de memorização, facilidade em aprender outros idiomas, fazer cálculos matemáticos complexos e uma característica que despertou a curiosidade acadêmica mundial, ele tem o sentido da sinestesia muito desenvolvido e consegue perceber e associar cores, formas e texturas e até sabores à números.

Nesse livro maravilhoso, Daniel conta sobre a diferença entre os vários espectros do autismo, as dificuldades e conquistas no seu desenvolvimento social, sua percepção sinestésica, a descoberta como homossexual, suas aventuras como voluntário na Lituânia, o documentário britânico que fizeram sobre ele e conta como foi seu encontro com Kim Peek, o autista que inspirou o personagem do filme Rayman.

Daniel tem um projeto de e-learning em idiomas chamado Optimnem, desenvolvido por ele e seu companheiro. O documentário da Discovery Science, Brainman, conta mais sobre quem é Daniel suas habilidades.

Segue abaixo um video seu e o link da Sociedade Nacional de Epilepsia do Reino Unido.

In no particular order, here are some wonderfully written, fun, diverse books written by people with autism or Asperger’s syndrome. I’ve read quite a few of them, and plan on reading others:

Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison. This is a funny, poignant account of Robison’s experiences growing up with Asperger’s syndrome. Interestly, he is the older brother of the wildly successful author of Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs, who does not have Asperger’s. It’s fascinating to read about both brothers’ completely different and varied experiences in and perception of the same family. I’ve heard Robison speak, and he is a very animated speaker and passionate advocate for those like himself with Asperger’s syndrome. Visit Robison’s blog or website.

Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extaordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet. This is an honest, open narrative by the autistic Tammet and includes an account of his amazing feat of reciting pi to the 22,514th digit. He is also a very talented writer. His second book is Embracing the Wide Sky: Exploring the Horizons of the Mind which I haven’t read yet.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.  Although this author is not autistic, I include this book here because it is written from the perspective of a fictional character with autism.  It’s an intriguing look into what it might be like in the mind of an autistic child.

Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior by Temple Grandin.  The title of this book does a great job summarizing the work that Grandin has been doing with her life – using her autism to an advantage to empathize with and understand how animals feel.  She is a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University.  Famously, she has worked with the meat industry to improve the ethical treatments of animals destined for slaughter.   Her newest book is The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger’s.  More information on Grandin can be found on her website.

Elf freundlich und Fünf laut ist?

Nein, ihr habt euch nicht verlesen. Es geht um Zahlen. Daniel Tammet beschreibt in seinem Buch “Elf ist freundlich und Fünf ist laut” seine Wahrnehmung der Welt. Der geniale Autist erklärt uns seine Welt, denn der Engländer sieht die Welt mit anderen Augen.

In dem Buch erklärt uns Daniel “seine” Welt und gibt einen einzigartigen Einblick in die Welt des Autismus. Er ist fähig in einer Woche eine neue Sprache zu lernen (in dem Fall Isländisch), er kann sich die Zahl Pi bis auf die 22.517. Stelle bildlich vorstellen und rechnet schneller und präziser als jeder Computer. Seine besonderen Fähigkeiten sind auf das Savant- Syndrom und eine gemäßigte Form des Autismus zurückzuführen.

Durch seine synästhetische Wahrnehmung sieht er Zahlen in verschiedenen Größen und Formen. Als er in New York in der Show von David Letterman war, sagte er diesem, dass er wie eine 117 aussehe. Groß und schlaksig. Primzahlen sind seine Lieblingszahlen, wenn er sich diese vorstellt, dann findet er innere Ruhe und Frieden.

In dem Buch sind auch einige Zeichnungen, wie er Zahlen sieht und teilweise sogar seine “Zahlenlandschaften”, aufgemalt. Ich musste oft lächeln, als ich das Buch gelesen habe und kann es nur jedem empfehlen.

Übrigens hat Daniel eine eigene Website, auf der er Sprachkurse und anderes anbietet.

http://www.optimnem.co.uk/

Daniel Tammet pudo recitar las 22.514 cifras de π en una exhibición con fines benéficos el 14 de marzo de 2004 (día de π, naturalmente). Se limitó a mirar el paisaje que formaban los dígitos, según se desplazaban ante sus ojos, e irlo pronunciando. Aquí hay un esquema, hecho por él, de como empieza este π-paisaje.

David Tammet posee una percepción sinestésica excepcionalmente rica y compleja. En su autobiografía Nacido en un día azul explica como esta percepción está en el origen de sus extraordinarias capacidades matemáticas.

 Nunca escribe nada cuando calcula, porque siempre ha podido hacer las cuentas en mi cabeza, y es mucho más fácil por él visualizar la respuesta utilizando las suyas formas sinestesias que tratar de hacer las cuentas con las técnicas de ?sumar y duro? que se enseñan en el colegio. Cuando multiplicarlo, ve los dos números como formas diferentes. La imagen cambia y emerge una tercera forma: la respuesta correcta. El proceso ocurre espontáneamente en cuestión de segundos. Es como hacer matemáticas sin pensar.

The boy with the Incredible brain….

A second set of clips from this British documentary. In this clip, you will meet the original Rain man, the inspiration for the movie.

Savant Daniel Tammet talks about intelligence and IQ tests (emphasis added):

LEHRER: In Embracing the Wide Sky you criticize the IQ test as a vast oversimplification of intelligence. You write: “There is no such thing as proofs of intelligence, only intelligence.” Could you explain what you mean by that?

TAMMET: When I was a child, my behavior was far from being what most people would label “intelligent.” It was often limited, repetitive and anti-social. I could not do many of the things that most people take for granted, such as looking someone in the eye or deciphering a person’s body language, and only acquired these skills with much effort over time. I also struggled to learn many of the techniques for spelling or doing sums taught in class because they did not match my own style of thinking.

I know from my own experience that there is much more to “intelligence” than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness of one person’s mind, or meaningfully describe the nature of his or her potential.

The bell curve distribution for IQ scores tells us that two thirds of the world’s population have an IQ somewhere between 85 and 115. This means that some four and a half billion people around the globe share just 31 numerical values (“He’s a 94,” “You’re a 110,” ”I’m a 103”), equivalent to 150 million people worldwide sharing the same IQ score. This sounds a lot to me like astrology, which lumps everyone into one of twelve signs of the zodiac.

Even if we cannot measure and assign precise values to it in any “scientific” way, I do very much think that “intelligence” exists and that it varies in the actions of each person. The concept is a useful and important one, for scientists and educators alike. My objection is to thinking that any ‘test’ of a person’s intelligence is up to the task. Rather we should focus on ensuring that the fundamentals (literacy, etc.) are well taught, and that each child’s diverse talents are encouraged and nourished.

Read the interview.

What Tammet says connects with issues raised in the series, Success Unexpected: Learning What Can’t Be Taught, especially the sections You Think You’re so Smart, There’s No Success Like Failure, and Mean IQ.

لینک به منبع

می دونستید باهوش ترین مرد دنیا

یه انگلیسی بیست و هشت ساله

دانیل تمت

از خودمونه؟

This will have to be a mini-epic, kids. I’m just warning you. I’ve been without my laptop for almost two weeks, thanks to an unfortunate mishap involving the power adapter…but even if I’d had something to blog upon, I’m not sure what I would have blogged about.

It’s been a crazy time.

In a nutshell: Sam accepted a contract job doing physical labor in the middle east that will pay off his mountain of student loan debt — and keep him tens of thousands of miles away for the next nine months. For exactly one moment, I entertained the notion of going with him, but it’s not exactly the green hills of Ireland, and my own options would have been restricted to some pretty unpalatable choices. Besides which, as it turns out, my presence would interfere with one of his main objectives for going (more on that in a bit). We had talked about vacationing abroad together during his two-week break in four months, but apparently that possibility has been shelved as well. I guess. I don’t even know where we’re at now. All I know is that I’m bereft, and sad, and that I don’t want to go back to our stupid workplace. This has made me want to fly to my own far places again, find my own adventure.

Sam and I didn’t part the way I would have wanted, but I can’t regret what I did that precipitated his angry withdrawal. He may have been looking for an excuse to withdraw, anyway.

As if that would make it easier on either of us.

**

I don’t know what I’m going to do now, how I’m going to cope, waking up without Sam’s arms wound around me, without the rich musk of his sweat-dampened skin or the surprisingly sweet, comforting scent of his hot breath. My inner animal is permanently chemically bonded to him. And that’s to say nothing of the sex: unprecedented pleasure I had felt doomed to live largely without ever since my mother “cursed” me (“No man will ever satisfy you”), whether because of social or previously discussed physical handicaps. With Sam, I’ve felt like the pornographic version of Goldilocks, finding “just right” at last. (Who’s been sleeping in my bed?) Not only that, but Sam has proven to be every bit the lover most women will tell you they long for: attentive, accommodating, passionate but loving, taking his time, with just the right touch. (And Jesus, what an outstanding kisser.) I’ve loved everything he’s ever done to me, without exception. I cannot say that about anyone else. Not anyone.

I love Sam’s body now as if it were my own. Perhaps more: I still judge my cellulite and varicose veins ruthlessly, whereas everything about his body I don’t adore I simply accept. I know all of his smells and his textures and his sensitive spots; I know the landscapes of his black, wiry hair and his scars and his rippling stretch marks where he lost lifelong fat. It pains me, physically, palpably, how cruel Sam is to this body I love, treating it like a malfunctioning machine or a workhorse to be beaten into obedience rather than as the sacred and irreplaceable temple housing and expressing all of the beautiful tenderness and passion inside of him (and giving us both so much pleasure). He will sacrifice scores of cells to kill his chronic pain; he will inundate his struggling lungs with foreign toxins, and think nothing of repeatedly burning or cutting his wonderful hands. It makes me want to weep, and to kiss them. (As things are, this would probably piss him off.)

**

“Would you have his babies?” my life coach friend asked at one point. He always asks his women clients this to determine how much in love they are on a visceral, biological level. About Sonny, I said yes; about Rick, I said no.

Sam and I, STD-free, and with me on the pill, never used any protection. At first, this made me nervous, given the sheer quantity of unfiltered sperm he was pumping into me on a regular basis. But when I started my period last week, the week of his departure, I felt the pangs of a strange and ineffable sadness.

**

This young man, about whom I once felt so ambivalent, has effectively ruined me for other men. Now even the most devastatingly attractive stranger evokes the question: How capable would he really be of intimacy? and: How could he possibly be a better lover than Sam? Even my way of seeing has changed. In the office on Sam’s last night at work, greedily gazing at his hair, his face, his body as if to memorize every last detail, I thought him the handsomest man on the planet. I think of the beautiful poem by Peter Handke that runs through Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, “Song of Childhood,” beginning the film with Als das kind kind war (When the child was a child):

When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.

Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

I seem to have exchanged what Rilke called “the adult’s defensiveness and scorn” for the wide-open eyes of childhood. Every person I meet looks different to me now. No one gets judged — any longer — against anything but him or herself.

I think I like the ways in which Sam has changed me.

**

Everything in my life has been disrupted lately, from my sleep schedule to my daily routines to my eating habits to my expectations of what a day or a night will bring. Sam introduced chaos into my life; I introduced calm into his. He fell asleep much more easily when entwined with me; my apartment was often the tranquil island where he shipwrecked at the end of a stormy night.

Before he left town, Sam was determined to share with me, as completely as possible, his secret second life, his insomniac’s nocturnal social circles and activities — some of which wound up making me feel akin to the girlfriend in “Twilight.” If I were to go into much detail about it here, most of my readers, except for possibly Russ, would engage in a collective hand-wringing session. Suffice it to say that, metaphorically speaking, one excellent reason for Sam to get the hell out of Dodge is to cut ties with the vampires — and to free himself of his own blood-lust. Sam was alternately defensive with me about his alternate world and pushing for me to be more upset about it. I tried to walk a fine line.

The past couple of weeks have been an uneasy education for sure. But as Rilke wrote (in the book I gave Sam), “if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.”

As if in response to my initiation into Sam’s alien universe, I dreamt of a sort of vast nighttime carnival populated by a motley assortment of semi-costumed individuals exhibiting various degrees of intoxication. It was as if I had inadvertently wandered onto the set of a Fellini film. Strangely, I was not in the least bit frightened, but meandered among them, eventually turning toward a destination where I had heard some kind of movie or show was going on. Sam’s friend Rob was there (I seem to remember him with a fishing rod and a tutu), and I easily befriended some of the others who were unfamiliar to me. I was comfortable and at home in this bizarre environment, and was almost sorry to leave my new friends behind when I awoke.

But then I guess I’ve always gotten along better with the so-called freaks.

**

“He’s twenty-one,”  my coach friend reminded me. “Do you know what I was doing when I was twenty-one? Taking speed so I could whip through my job stocking candy machines, get out of there, and go party.”  Doc (a pseudonym I came up with thanks to Sam) met with the two of us the other week; he liked Sam a lot. Doc can handle all of the freakier truths without overreacting.

Sam is just young, he said. I grew out of all that shit, and hopefully he will too.

**

To know the pain of too much tenderness. — Kahlil Gibran

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone so hard.

From the outset, I’ve striven to honor the inherent, impenetrable solitude of Sam’s being, even though his deep and persistent sadness — the byproduct of an upbringing filled with struggle and privation and cruelty — makes me yearn to make it all better for him.

Sam is, at any rate, a beautiful and extraordinary person. He has a mind unlike the majority of other people, sharing many of the gifts, and also many of the challenges, of people on the autistic spectrum (Russ and bluemorpho3, take note). He urged me to read Born on a Blue Day, the autobiography of a savant with Asperger Syndrome, in order to better understand him, and I complied in short order. The author of the book, Daniel Tammet, has synaesthesia, too, a fascinating multisensory way of perceiving and ordering things like numbers and days of the week. (Wednesdays are blue, hence the title.) Daniel grew up withdrawn into a world of his own, and has always had difficulty with social interaction. Much as Sam has.

An aside: the book had the interesting side effect of making me think long and hard about my own math-whiz father — whose rationalistic and unemotional values always seemed to denigrate and invalidate my emotive, intuitive, empathic self (as “frivolous”) — and who is very likely an undiagnosed case on that same spectrum himself. My fossilized resentment began to dissolve as I realized that he probably couldn’t help himself, that it was easier for him to be friends with numbers than with his own daughter. I started to find myself relenting a little, being more able to find a scrap of compassion and forgiveness for his limitations, rather than seeing him as the towering and rigid authority figure he seemed to me as a child. Maybe he had simply done the best he could.

But back to Sam. I spoke before of what a terrific leader and manager he is because of his listening skills and his responsiveness. I had no idea at the time of how hard he has had to work, both to understand others and to respond appropriately. It’s no wonder he has a way of making people feel as if they have his complete and undivided attention. He has to intensely focus upon their words and their body language.

A fierce Libertarian, Sam talks the talk of unlimited personal freedom (and chafes at any infringement thereof), but walks the walk of a “bleeding-heart” caretaker who frequently assumes responsibility for the well-being of others (often at substantial personal cost). Miranda was far from his first emergency. People utterly exhaust Sam, but somehow he always winds up in the thick of the fray. When the assistant director got suspended from work, Sam wound up putting in a lot of extra time as the only person at the company who knew how to take care of everything.

His tragic flaw is that he can’t say no, at least not when friends and coworkers ask him for help. This leads to a whole host of other difficulties, including the extreme stress he suffered at the time of his leaving that precipitated our blowout.

**

I have never had any man let me so unreservedly and unequivocally into his life before, and share even the most unflattering and trying aspects of it with me. It’s as if Sam were as ready to find me as I was to find him. He frequently said that my timing was impeccable. I don’t know about that, but things did seem to fall right into line once I made up my mind to make my move. Sam’s pre-dawn dealings among the night-crawlers and his cognitive obstacles did create challenges for me, but I somehow located equanimity and patience within myself beyond what I even knew I had. And he fully recognized and appreciated this.

What makes me sad is to think he’s convinced himself that I don’t fully recognize or appreciate his own needs and priorities.

**

After an idyllic weekend, our harmony began to disintegrate in the days leading up to Sam’s departure for his childhood home in the midwest. He had planned to drive the 650 miles to visit his parents (and brother) before leaving the country.

Sam being Sam, however, he had agreed to take on numerous shifts, trainings, workshops, and other responsibilities at work that week, including closing on Friday night at ten o’clock (after which he would leave on his long drive!). He was quickly running out of time. On the phone, after I complained about him not returning my calls, he vented bitterly (and with escalating anxiety) about all the things he still had left to do, including figure out what to do about his apartment still under lease — which he had asked me if I could move into not long before, and I had said I couldn’t — and what to do about his truck, which still had no brakes to speak of. A relative he had paid to repair them had never come through. His anger, and the desperation of his situation, completely infected me with anxiety (how could I stand by and watch him drive away in a car with no real brakes?) and I offered to buy him a plane ticket or rent him a car. He was adamant about not taking any money from me, or anyone, and about not being indebted to anyone.

He informed me that he intended to get as much sleep as possible that night because he had to work all day the next day, Thursday. He had originally hoped to have all day free. (He even threw some of the blame for that at me, thinking he was taking a workshop or orientation I had begged off of, but that just wasn’t true. Another employee had gotten sick.) I kept asking how I could help him, but he just wanted to be left alone that night.

So I left him alone that night.

And stayed awake for most of it, weepy from worry and Sam’s curtness and trying to figure out what to tackle. I agonized over my decision about his apartment, even though I knew for certain I couldn’t live there. I appealed to my old absentee boss: “Help me help him,” I prayed, to whomever would listen. In the end, I realized that what was bothering me most was the truck. I couldn’t let Sam drive away in a vehicle that big that might not be able to stop. Flipping through the Yellow Pages in the wee hours, I decided I was going to get that damn truck to Just Brakes tomorrow, somehow, even if Sam never forgave me for it.

Except that Sam didn’t show up at work the next morning. And he wasn’t answering the phone, either. So I went over to his building, tossing pebbles at his window the way his friends do. Some facially-pierced skater kids let me in the front door, and I went down to his garden level apartment and knocked. I heard a door open somewhere inside, but no one opened the apartment door. I left Sam another message, reiterating my full intentions, waited in the hall awhile, and then left.

Sam called me in the late afternoon, fuming. He had been up all night dealing with shit and had been trying to sleep during the day…but “people kept fucking calling me, and throwing gravel at my window, and knocking on my goddamn door!” He had told me twice he wouldn’t take money from me. Why couldn’t I respect his wishes or trust his judgment? The Miss Cribb in me, who had surfaced over this issue, wouldn’t back down, even though the rest of me was trembling, and I told him I wouldn’t push so hard if it weren’t a matter of life or death, and if I didn’t love him. If anything happened to him on the highway, I’d never forgive myself. Still furious, he snarled “Well maybe at least THEN I’d get some peace and quiet!!!” (He didn’t see the humor in this.) Anyway, it wasn’t for me to worry about, it was for him to worry about, and I was just adding to his stress.

After his angry hangup I called Doc, crying. Doc talked me through it. All people in relationships fight, he reminded me. You’ll get through this, just like everybody else.

At work that night, Sam did seem to have calmed down some. He was still dealing with trainees when the rest of us were let go, so I called and left him a message while walking home.

He called me back, but was brusque and cold, telling me that I wasn’t one of the people who truly understood why he was taking this job in the first place, and that he hadn’t ever been able to communicate it to me. No, he didn’t want me to come over. He had too much packing to do. He ended the conversation saying “this could have gone more than one way”…meaning, obviously, that I had done something wrong, “blown” it. He was eager to get off the phone, despite my pleas for further communication. He said he’d see me at work tomorrow (his last day at work and in town).

Reeling from shock, I had a Three-Mile-Island-size meltdown.

Such irony. I was afraid to start something with Sam for fear I might break his heart, remember? And here I was, feeling rejected, abandoned, shattered. He had urged me before not to let him shut me out, but I had no idea how to break down this wall now. Sam was going away, and I felt he was corralling me behind the fence with all of his “unnecessary” people, the ones being cut loose. I curled up in bed in the fetal position and convulsed with sobs.

That jagged, ancient heartache I’ve often spoke of was not only present, but radiated outward, until every cell, from the tips of my toes to the ends of my hair, throbbed with pain. I fancied I might fly to pieces from the internal pressure. Soon after the first wave engulfed me, there was a blinding flash of light, then the crack of thunder. An electrical storm raged outside. As the feeling ebbed, the storm seemed to do the same; when another wave washed over me, another flash of light illumined the room. I began to believe, with mad conviction, that the wildly oscillating electromagnetic field caused my my overwhelming pain was causing the storm, not unlike the way the sky is said to have gone dark as Christ writhed crucified upon the cross. And it did feel as if I were carrying not only my own anguish, but also the burden of all of Sam’s disowned and banished emotions. I thought I had plumbed the depths of heartbreak, but this was agony. I wept myself totally dry. I imagined that my hair might turn white overnight from the stress, or that I might otherwise physically transform.

And indeed, in the morning, I was confronted by a stranger in the mirror. My face was hideous. Both eyes were swollen beyond recognition: baggy frog-eyes with deep creases and circles beneath them, both eyelids drooping heavily. My left eye, half closed, made me look as if I had had a stroke. It was frightening. I looked like someone else, someone twenty or thirty years older. I can’t go into work looking like this, I thought. I can’t let Sam see me like this. What was I going to do? Recalling something I had read in a magazine about how supermodels alleviate eye puffiness, I smeared the affected area with Preparation-H. Then I got dressed, put on my glasses, and went to see Doc.

**

“Yeah, yeah,” Doc said. “I know you think he’s so mature, but don’t forget, he’s twenty-one. Guys, when they’re twenty-one…when I was that age, I thought I knew everything, and I had that same kind of an attitude, like — fuck everyone, nobody understands me, and I’m going to go off and do my own thing.”

He chuckled. “You can’t take any of it personally. He’s under extreme stress, and just isn’t equipped at this point to handle his emotions. He probably has problems receiving, too.

“Look, you just love him. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

**

At work that evening, Sam came to get me, sat me down in the office, and closed the door. He smiled faintly. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m getting the brakes fixed tonight.” He had apparently used “the right threats” with his deadbeat uncle, who was going to get the job done for him at midnight, after which Sam would take off.

I gasped with relief. “Thank God,” I said. “Thank God.”

“I told you I’d take care of it,” he said, busying himself with a printout he’d made for another employee. I could have wept, if I weren’t already cried out, and told him so. He really didn’t want to hear about how I spent the previous evening, or what my eyes had looked like. He said he’d shoot me an email when he got to his folks’ place. I wanted to know if we were okay, but all he would say was “I’m leaving for nine months.” Then he shooed me out of the office.

But I was still smiling. I’d won the right battle. Sam would be safe.

At the end of the night, I lingered. There seemed to be a small posse of guys hanging around waiting for Sam to close up shop, and my fear was screaming at me that he didn’t want me there. I told my fear to shut up, went into the office, and sat down next to Rob. And gazed at Sam’s face, trying to memorize it. What else was important? My beloved was going away. Even if he didn’t love me, I was going to stay by his side until he chased me off.

When we did get out of there, it wound up being me and Sam and Rob and another guy named Brad in the truck, heading into the heart of the Hill to pick up something necessary to the repairs (I forget what). On Eleventh Avenue, we pulled over and piled out. Brad lived close by, and was walking home from there; Rob walked toward an apartment building, then turned to wait for Sam. I walked toward Sam. “I was just following you,” I said, shrugging.

“Right on,” he said. He and Brad said their goodbyes. As Brad walked away, Sam turned toward me. He pointed out that I wasn’t far from home, and I understood that I would have to get myself there. He went to embrace me — an embrace without any Sam in it — and began to say “See you…” but I interrupted.

“If this is over,” I said over his shoulder, “I want you to know that you gave me the time of my life.” I turned my head to speak into his ear. “Take care of this beautiful body I love.” (He expelled a quick snort, the way he did when I surprised him with an unaccustomed compliment.) I kissed his cheek, and pulled back to look at his face. “Take care of this beautiful mind that I love.” I kissed his lips. For once, Sam was virtually unresponsive. As we separated, however, I saw a flicker of the Sam I knew best in his eyes before he turned away. “I’ll be back in June!” he boomed heartily over his shoulder, walking toward Rob.

I started home, and the tears started again. But I felt no regret. I had said what I needed to say. And Sam would be safe. I could sleep well tonight.

**

The next day I attended to all the neglected things in my life, like buying groceries and an adapter for my computer. Coming back, I decided to catch the bus home over by Sam’s apartment building. Absorbed in Sam-reverie, I suddenly heard Glen Hansard burst into song in my pocket. It was Sam’s ringtone, “Falling Slowly.”

He was calling to tell me he had reached his brother’s town safely. I was elated, and thanked him for letting me know (especially since I’d never expected a call). He said his uncle had fixed not only the brakes, but some other things too. He told me some of the things he’d missed about the midwest, like the smell of cow shit. I laughed. He said this would probably be his last phone contact before leaving, but that he’d be on email. And possibly Facebook. Even though he hated Facebook. I told him he didn’t have to do Facebook.

It was a pleasant and upbeat conversation overall. I didn’t try to address the state of our relationship; I just slipped in a “love you” before hanging up.

**

I told Sam, in happier times, that I’d take a bullet for him. Maybe in the end the “bullet” I had to take for him was his rage and his rejection in exchange for his ultimate safety. I was ready to lose Sam to save him. Maybe I did.

Or maybe Sam planned this all along — to put distance between us before leaving, even though he insisted he wasn’t doing this to get away from me.

Because the fact is, I do understand why he’s going over there. To get the hell away from people. To “be a robot,” as he put it, at least for a while. To work his body hard, and give his overtaxed mind a rest. Our relationship was truly heaven on earth for me — it was what I had waited for all my life — but it may have been too much for a boy born on a blue day.

Then again, when someone gives you everything you ever wanted, and asks you for just one big thing in return, it’s only fair to give it to him. Even if what he asks is for you to let him go.

But part of me is still crying in the dust like Psyche, clutching after Cupid’s fleeing golden feet.

Manusia itu memang mahkluk yang unik, namun diantara manusia yang unik, akan kita temukan lagi manusia yang paling unik diantaranya, dimana manusia yang dimaksudkan disini adalah manusia yang mempunyai kemampuan yang lebih dari manusia normal, dan oleh sebab itu disebut dengan manusia berkemampuan super

1. Manusia dengan Otak yang Menakjubkan (Daniel Tammet)
Daniel Paul Tammet adalah orang Inggris yang berbakat dengan kemampuan yang luar biasa pada perhitungan matematis, memori, dan pembelajaran bahasa. Ia dilahirkan dengan bawaan epilepsi. Ia mengatakan, setiap angka hingga 10.000 masing – masing memiliki ‘rasa dan bentuk’ yang unik, sehingga ia dapat ‘merasakan’ apakah suatu angka tersebut termasuk angka yang utama ataupun campuran. Sebagai contoh, ia mengatakan bahwa angka 289 adalah angka yang jelek, angka 333 menarik, dan Pi itu indah.

Tammet memegang rekor sebagai orang yang ‘memproses’ dan menghitung nilai Pi ke angka 22,514 hanya dalam waktu lima jam. Dia juga mampu berbicara dalam berbagai bahasa, termasuk Inggris, Perancis, Finlandia, Jerman, Spanyol, Lithuania, Rumania, Estonia, Wales, dan Esperento. Khususnya, dia menyukai Bahasa Estonia karena kaya akan huruf hidup. Tammet mampu mempelajari bahasa baru dengan sangat cepat. Untuk membuktikannya, Tammet ditantang Channel Five (sebuah saluran TV) untuk mempelajari Bahasa Islandia hanya dalam 1 minggu. 7 hari kemudian, Tammet muncul di televisi Islandia dan berbicara dalam Bahasa Islandia. Sampai – sampai, instruktur bahasa Tammet mengatakan bahwa Tammet ‘manusia yang tidak seperti manusia’.

2. Manusia dengan Pengelihatan Sonar (Ben Underwood)
Ben Underwood itu buta, kedua matanya telah rusak karena kanker, ketika ia berusia 3 tahun. Namun, dia bermain bola basket, main sepeda, dan kehidupan yang cukup normal seperti biasanya. Dia melatih dirinya untuk menggunakan gelombang sonar untuk bernavigasi di seluruh dunia, tanpa panduan anjing untuk menuntunnya, tanpa tangan untuk meraba – raba, ia menggunakan SUARA! Ben menghasilkan suara yang kemudian memantul pada suatu benda dan pantulan suara itu kembali pada dirinya. Dia satu – satunya orang di dunia yang melihat menggunakan suara sonar seperti lumba – lumba, kapal laut, dan kelelawar.

3. The Rubberboy (Daniel Smith Browning)
Lima kali pemegang Guinness Record, The Rubberboy (manusia lentur) adalah manusia yang paling lentur, ia mampu melakukan gerakan – gerakan yang sulit dilakukan manusia biasa, seolah – olah ia tidak memiliki tulang didalam badannya. Dia telah banyak tampil dalam acara The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, ESPN’s Sports Center, Oprah Winfrey, Ripley’s Believe It atau Tidak, arena du Soleil, Best Damn Sports Show Period, The Discovery Channel, Men in Black 2, HBO’s Carnivale, dan CSI: NY. Dia mampu memasukkan badannya dari kaki sampai kepala hanya melalui raket tenis! Dia juga mampu melakukan gerakan – gerakan yang aneh dan senam badan yang unik.

4. Mister “Eat-it-All” (Michel Lotito)
Michel Lotito atau dikenal dengan Mister Eat it All (atau mungkin Bahasa Indonesianya :Tuan Makan Ini Itu .) Terkenal dengan keanehannya, yaitu mampu memakan benda – benda yang asing untuk dimakan. Lotito mampu memakan logam, kaca, karet, dan sebagainya. Bahkan ia juga mampu memakan barang – barang seperti sepeda, televisi dan sebuah PESAWAT CESSNA 150! Ia memerlukan waktu sekitar 2 tahun untuk memakan sebuah Cessna 150, dari 1978 sampai 1980. Walaupun demikian, Lotito jarang menderita sakit. Rupanya, dia memiliki usus dan perut yang lebih tebal dindingnya.

5. Manusia dengan Gigi yang Luar Biasa Kuat (Rathakrishnan Velu)
Pada tanggal 30 Agustus 2007, pada Hari Kemerdekaan Malaysia yang ke-50, Rathakrishnan Velu (atau dikenal dengan Raja Gigi) memecahkan rekor dunia atas namanya sendiri untuk menarik kereta dengan gigi, kali ini dengan 6 gerbong terpasang, berat 297 ton, dan sejauh 2,8 meter di Kuala Lumpur Old Railway Station. Raja Gigi pernah belajar teknik memperkuat salah satu bagian tubuhnya dari guru di India pada usia 14 tahun.

6. Manusia Magnet (Liew Thow Lin)
Liew Thow Lin (70), seorang kontraktor di Malaysia, akhir – akhir ini menjadi sorotan berita karena menarik sebuah mobil dari jarak 20 meter. Ia mengatakan bahwa ia memiliki kemampuan untuk membuat sebuah benda melekat secara magnetik ke kulit. Cerita bermula ketika ia membaca artikel tentang sebuah keluarga di Taiwan ya gila kuasa. (mungkin) ia menjadi geram dan mengambil beberapa besi dan ia letakkan di perut (gak tau untuk apa). Dan ia terkejut, semua benda melekat pada kulitnya dan tidak terjatuh. Keanehan ini juga dimiliki 3 anaknya dan 2 cucunya. Ternyata keanehan ini turun temurun.

7. Manusia yang Tidak Tidur (Thai Ngoc)
Thai Ngoc, yang dikenal sebagai Hai Ngoc, mengatakan ia tidak dapat tidur di malam hari setelah menderita demam pada tahun 1973, dan telah lebih dari 11.700 malam ia lalui tanpa tidur. Tapi saya tetap sehat dan dapat bertani secara normal seperti yang lain,” kata Ngoc. Ngoc hidup pada saat ini mengurusi 5Ha tanah di kaki gunung, sibuk dengan pertanian dan merawat babi dan ayam setiap hari.

8. Raja Penyiksaan (Tim Cridland)
Tim Cridland tampaknya tidak merasakan sakit seperti orang kebanyakan. Ia mengagumkan semua orang dengan memasukkan jarum ke dalam lengannya tanpa sakit. Tes ilmiah menunjukkan bahwa Tim dapat menoleransi lebih besar rasa sakit daripada manusia biasa. Ia juga mampu mendorong jarum menembus tubuhnya tanpa luka.Tapi, untuk melakukannya secara aman, dia juga mempelajari anatomi manusia, karena jika ia menusuk saluran arteri akibatnya bisa fatal.

9. The Lion Whisperer (Kevin Richardson)
Peneliti tingkah laku binatang, Kevin Richardson, mengatakan ia memakai insting untuk menenangkan hati dan membentuk ikatan intim dengan singa. Ia dapat menghabiskan semalaman penuh dengan singa tanpa sedikit pun merasa takut akan diserang. Instingnya tidak hanya bekerja pada singa, tapi juga pada binatang lain seperti Cheetah dan Hyena. Mereka tidak selalu merupakan ancaman bagi Kevin. Singa adalah binatang favoritnya. Ini adalah pekerjaan yang berbahaya, tapi Kevin sangat bersemangat menjalaninya.

10. Manusia dengan Mata Melotot (Claudio Pinto)
Claudio Pinto dapat membuat kedua matanya melotot hingga 4 cm atau ‘mengeluarkan’ 95% dari keseluruhan bola mata manusia. Dia sekarang sedang mengejar rekor dunia melotot. Pinto telah dites berulang kali dan semua dokter mengatakan mereka tidak pernah melihat ada orang yang bisa melotot sehebat Pinto . Mr.Pinto dari Belo Horizonte, berkata: “Ini adalah cara mudah menghasilkan uang. Saya dapat melotot hingga 4 cm dan ini adalah hadiah dari Tuhan, saya merasa diberkati.”

Peaceful Atheist has another extremely interesting post which, like her previous one exploring the need even for an atheist to explore what she calls her “religious imagination and need for transcendence” about which we already blogged here, now explores the role that spatial thinking played in her formerly religious thinking and how it works in her engagement with mathematics. Her whole post is worth reading, so click on the link, but here’s a taste for even the lazy link-unclickers to enjoy:

When I read, for example, I have vivid mental images not just of the subject matter being described, but also of the sentences and words themselves, represented by symbols, objects, or colors that I can rearrange. I see each arrangement as having a kind of tone, and parts of each sentence as smooth or rough. Awkward writing stands out to me as spatial incongruities. The more I reread or rewrite something, the more finely I see its texture.

The same goes for math. I remember once trying to explain to my Linear Algebra professor why I wasn’t grasping a particular concept or proof: “whenever I work on a problem, I see images in my head. They usually have nothing to do with the problem– they can be pictures of a house or just floating shapes– but they always come together in a certain way that makes me able to figure out the problem. The pictures just aren’t coming together for this one.”

Now that I’m an atheist, I sometimes notice a lack in this area. I mean that I have found myself missing a certain mental aspect of life which religion provided richly. It was as if I had an entire additional life, an inner life that was my relationship with God and my exploration of the entire system of Christianity. It was deep and rich in metaphor and emotionally complex, the opposite of everything concrete and scientific and practical. I feel like that part of my mind has now fallen into disuse. My attempts at atheist spirituality have so far only replaced some parts of that, and intellectual exercises provide nothing that I didn’t also have when I was a Christian.

I don’t feel as challenged or as mentally fulfilled in a purely material universe.

I don’t necessarily believe that religion is the only thing that can fill that hole.

And no discussion of spatial mathematical thinking or synesthesia is complete without reminding everyone of the remarkable case of Daniel Tammet (about whom we blogged a couple weeks ago). So, here’s the youtube video about him again, for any who have yet to see it or who want to marvel once again:

Your Thoughts?

The story of Daniel Tammet’s amazing, amazing, amazing brain.  Tammet can master a new language in a week and he can memorize pi to thousands of places and do extraordinarily complicated math problems in his head simply seeing the numbers and other images and patterns in his mind.

There are 5 parts, be sure to watch them all.

Your Thoughts?

[singlepic id=524 w=200 h=102 float=left]In dieser spannenden Dokumentation wird Daniel Tammet vorgestellt, ein junger Mann mit schier unglaublichen Fähigkeiten. Der 25-jährige Engländer ist wahrscheinlich der größte Hirnathlet der Welt. Daniel ist nicht nur ein absolutes Mathe-Ass. Er hat auch ein schier unerschöpfliches Gedõchtnis und spricht fließend neun Sprachen.

Als Kleinkind litt Daniel Tammet häufig unter epileptischen Anfällen. Im Alter von drei Jahren hatte er eine besonders schwere Attacke. Seitdem scheint mit seinem Gehirn etwas passiert zu sein. Als Grundschüler las er am liebsten Mathebücher und löste Rechenaufgaben. Während die anderen auf dem Pausenhof spielten, betrachtete Daniel die Bäume und studierte die Muster in den Blättern. Heute kann Daniel die unglaublichsten Rechenaufgaben im Kopf lösen.

Dabei kann er Ergebnisse bis zu hundert Ziffern nach dem Komma ohne Fehler errechnen. Auch sein Gedächtnis scheint nicht von dieser Welt zu sein. Er kann sich eine Reihe von über 22.000 Ziffern merken und die Ziffernreihe fehlerfrei wieder geben. Außerdem ist David ein Sprachgenie.

Er spricht neun Sprachen und kann innerhalb einer Woche eine neue Sprache konversationsreif lernen, was er in der Sendung auch beweist!

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7986159936431289446[/googlevideo]

Quelle: Google Video

Dear Reader,

You gotta love the cover of the paperback edition of Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Aspergers. It features a photo of a geeky-eared boy, his eyes and mouth scrunched shut in a “you-can’t-make-me” way. It’s the reason I picked up the book. Author John Elder Robison has Asperger’s. He didn’t graduate from high school, didn’t go to college, but he did design “fire-breathing” guitars for KISS, solve problems as an electrical engineer, marry twice, and start a business called J E Robinson Service, which repairs and restores Rolls-Royces, Land Rovers, and Mercedes cars. He’s successful. Of course, Robinson learned a lot to enable himself to get where he is now, most importantly to work with his strengths and to practice introspection. (I think he would say he isn’t typical of someone who has Asperger’s; no one is typical.)

Robinson talks about the thing he’s always had for machines:

“Many people with Asperger’s have an affinity for machines. Sometimes I think I can relate better to a good machine than any kind of person. I’ve thought about why that is, and I’ve come up with a few ideas. One thought is that I control the machines. We don’t interact as equals. No matter how big the machine, I am in charge. Machines don’t talk back. They are predictable. They don’t trick me, and they’re never mean.

“I have a lot of trouble reading other people. I am not very good at looking at people and knowing whether they like me, or they’re mad, or they’re just waiting for me to say something. I don’t have problems like that with machines.”

He also talks about “Looking people in the eye”:

“I was well into my teenage years before I figured out that I wasn’t a killer, or worse. By then, I knew I wasn’t being shifty or evasive when I failed to meet someone’s gaze, and I had started to wonder why so many adults equated that behavior with shiftiness and evasiveness. Also, by then I had met shifty and scummy people who did look me in the eye, making me think the people who complained about me were hypocrites.

“To this day, when I speak, I find visual input to be distracting. When I was younger, if I saw something interesting I might begin to watch it and stop speaking entirely. As a grown-up, I don’t usually come to a complete stop, but I may still pause if something catches my eye. That’s why I usually look somewhere neutral—at the ground or off into the distance—when I’m talking to someone. Because speaking while watching things has always been difficult for me, learning to drive a car and talk at the same time was tough one, but I mastered it.

“And now I know it is perfectly natural for me not to look at someone when I talk. Those of us with Asperger’s are just not comfortable doing it. In fact, I don’t really understand why it’s considered normal to stare at someone’s eyeballs.”

I’m glad I read this book, because it gave me some understanding about people like Robinson, whom I consider rude, clueless, or just plain weird. I’d like to think this understanding will help me think before I judge.

Note: John Elder Robison is Augusten Burroughs’ (Running with Scissors) older brother.

For other angles on Asperger’s and Autism Spectrum disorders, read:

Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant – Daniel Tammet

Thinking in Pictures – Temple Grandin

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – fiction by Mark Haddon

Autism and Me: Siblings Stories -Ouisie Shapiro and Steven Vote (See my 5-18-09 post)

The Boy With The Incredible Brain

Daniel Tammet är inte en vanlig engelsk kille. Han besitter extrema hjärnfunktioner, och vi får hur han huvudräknar till över 100 decimaler, rabbla upp 25 000 siffror i talet PI och lära sig isländska på en vecka. Det är fascinerande men det mest intressanta är hans egna beskrivningar av hur han gör det. Enligt Daniel så räknar han inte ut något, han gör inga kalkylationer alls.  Svaren bara kommer till honom i form av 3-dimensionella objekt som han ser framför sig. Deras lyster, rörelser, färger, mönster, former och lukt skiljer sig och representerar olika nummer och nummerserier. När han sedan lyckas vinna i Black Jack genom att “se” att han ska splitta tre kort och får sen 21 på alla händerna, så blir det nästan lite kusligt, och man börjar tvivla på dokumentärens objektivitet.

Kickern är att Daniel kanske inte bara är ett matematiskt geni, utan rentav världsunik med sitt intuitiva och “otänkbara” sätt att kalkylera. Och till skillnad från andra stora savanter såsom Kim Peek (“Rain Man”) så är han normal i sina social funktioner, och kan därför lättar samarbeta med forskarlag. Detta har lett till en förhoppning att man med hjälp av Daniel kan finna nycklar till att kunna utveckla liknande förmågar hos vanliga människor. Det skulle nog många gilla. Speciellt om man har nytta av det vid spelbordet.

Having originally pulled the term “synaesthetic syncretism” out of nowhere for that post title, watch as I abandon it like an unwanted bastard child.

In all seriousness, I wanted to write today about something that’s been going through my head this past week, in relation to learning. That is, the idea that we learn better when what we are learning is as rich as possible in sensation and sensorial stimuli, when it stimulates our minds, senses, and emotions as more than dry information that must be memorised.

First, a disclaimer and a bit of primer: I have no formal education in teaching, pedagogy, or psychology. Although I work as a teacher, I’m largely self-taught in this aspect – in their infinite wisdom, the powers that be decreed that as an “assistant” teacher in Japanese schools, I don’t need formal teaching qualifications, since I’ll largely be assisting a qualified Japanese teacher of English. As so often happens, this is somewhat more true in principle than er…in reality. But that’s not the subject of this post. The JET program – what can I say? It really is an adventure of self-discovery

I started down this particular train of thought after reading this piece on Boing Boing – a link to an interview with Daniel Tammet, a cognitive savant who apparently holds a European record for memorising the digits of Pi and is also quite brilliant at learning languages. What caught my attention, though, is the way Tammet describes his the functioning of his mind:

I have always thought of abstract information—numbers for example—in visual, dynamic form. Numbers assume complex, multi-dimensional shapes in my head that I manipulate to form the solution to sums, or compare when determining whether they are prime or not. 
For languages, I do something similar in terms of thinking of words as belonging to clusters of meaning so that each piece of vocabulary makes sense according to its place in my mental architecture for that language. In this way I can easily discern relationships between words, which helps me to remember them. 
In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my “friends.” I think this is why my memory is very deep, because the information is not static. I say in my book that I do not crunch numbers (like a computer). Rather, I dance with them.

I encourage you to read the article – Tammet’s take on his own creativity, and thought processes are inspiring and slightly haunting (I really want to read his book now…) What interested me is that Tammet attributes his amazing cognitive skills to his creativity, and the syncretic (if that’s the right word) or “hyper-connected” way that his mind works. How different is this to the way we are (usually) taught in schools? Although it’s not always the case, I think that conventional education tends to present learning as abstract material to be consumed and internalised in a wholly cognitive and fairly dry way. University Arts courses, I can say from first hand experience, may be slightly better in that the best ones encourage a real engagement with their subject and try to inspire critical thinking. Really though, the emphasis is still on consuming large amounts of fairly dense reading material and processing it in a wholly cognitive manner.

In contrast, Tammet describes an emotional and sensorial connection to everything he learns. For him, nothing is static information – everything has colour, texture, and emotion linked to it. Tammet, perhaps, is incapable of not thinking like this. But he believes that more conventional thinkers (ie. the rest of us) can learn from him, and so do I. I’ve read accounts written by people who’ve mastered extraordinary feats of memorisation – among other things, I own Derren Brown’s book, “Tricks of the mind”. A simple trick that Brown describes is to link every item in a list of words to be memorised to an absurd and amusing mental image – and then to link each following mnemonic image to the one before it. The common element to a lot of these mnemonic tricks is that they involve linking “abstract” information to be memorised to sensations, images, and memories. This is also how I learned hiragana and katakana, and these were arguably the only two useful things that I ever remembered from High School Japanese.

Another dimension to this idea is that of physical movement. Total Physical Response (TPR) is a method of second/foreign language teaching that involves minimal explanation, instead teaching students by giving them (initially simple) commands in the target language, and to which they respond physically. The idea behind TPR is to mimic the way language is learned naturally. I wonder, however, if this is the whole reason why it works. What if it works not only because it triggers some natural language-learning mechanism of the human mind, but because of the way it links richer physical sensations to the learned language? This was also brought to mind by another (as always) fantastic post on Boing Boing – recent experiments in cognitive psychology that show that physical gesturing actually helps us think and learn. What if the more sensation we can attach to the things we learn, the better we will learn them?

I’m sure this is nothing new to some readers, but for me the personal revelation is the extent of this, and how I might apply it to both my learning and my teaching. This idea makes sense to me, in a way – it’s a more holistic approach to learning. Our minds are not one-dimensional, and we are not computers. Our brains are made of neurons that build physical links to one another as we learn – it makes sense that the more we can link new learning to our existing knowledge, and the richer with sensation and emotion, the more multi-dimensional we can make that knowledge, the more it will resonate with us and stay with us.

So what usefulness can you extract from all this musing of mine? Several things, I hope. Perhaps we should try not to treat the things we learn (or teach) as abstract and one-dimensional. I think we will have more success if we seek to bring the classroom or study-desk as close to the world of the learner – whether it be ourselves or someone else – as is possible. We should try and link our learning to our passions and to as many other sensations as possible. I think the best language teachers that I know personally are those who’ve realised this and use it in every lesson that they teach. For myself, this is incentive to try and make both my own learning and the classes I teach as rich in colour, humor, absurdity, imagery, physical movement, and sensation as I possibly can. I’ll let you know how it works out.

Disclaimer: this is a late note post that’s a bit later than I intended. Especially given the length and subject matter, it may be best treated as a draft for the time being

Meet Daniel Tammet. At 30 years old, he holds the European record for reciting pi from memory to 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes. He speaks eleven languages and once learned Icelandic in a week for a British television show. He can individually visualize or sense every integer up to 10,000, allowing him to see extremely complex calculations as landscapes and intuitively tell whether a number is prime or not.  Mr. Tammet does math like the rest of the human race breathes. This talent seems innate – a beautiful permutation of genetic and environmental factors that influenced his birth and early childhood to produce this outcome.

Wikipedia describes Tammet as “a high functioning autistic savant.” He can do these extraordinary things with his mind and not suffer from paralyzing mental deficiencies, such as an inability to recognize facial expressions in others, or an unhealthy fixations with 1920s dance routines from the southern United States. Tammet’s lack of Rain Man-itis allows us to get a glimpse of what its actually like to have his brain. For him, doing calculations like 9251/387 are as simple to do in his head as it is for us to see the colour green. That’s extraordinary, because most of the time, I take seeing colour for granted.

Tammet’s brain and my brain have the same hardware – all our constituent parts are the same. Synesthesia, the neurological process that lets Tammet “see” and “feel” the numbers, can also be experienced after strokes, seizures, the onset of blindness or deafness, and under hallucinogenic drugs. For Tammet, the combination of synesthesia with autism has produced a very unique outcome. For the rest of us, the best we can hope for is to learn something from his experience that might help normal people understand why they don’t understand things. It’s incorrect to draw public policy implications from one man’s story, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Scientific American interviews Mr. Tammet here, and he has some interesting things to say about cognition, memory, and the five pounds of gray matter where we live.

On his memory:

In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture, and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my “friends.” I think this is why my memory is very deep, because the information is not static. I say in my book that I do not crunch numbers (like a computer). Rather I dance with them.

On IQ tests:

The bell curve distribution for IQ scores tells us that two thirds of the world’s population has an IQ somewhere between 85 and 115. This means that some four and a half billion people around the globe share just 31 numerical values (“he’s a 94,” “you’re a 110,” “I’m a 103”), equivalent to 150 million people worldwide sharing the same IQ score. This sounds a lot to me like astrology, which lumps everyone into one of 12 signs of the zodiac.

On creativity:

My brain has developed a little differently from most other people’s. Aside from my high-functioning autism, I also suffered from epileptic seizures as a young child. In my book, I propose a link between my brain’s functioning and my creative abilities based on the property of hyperconnectivity.

In most people, the brain’s major functions are performed separately and not allowed to interfere with one another. Scientists have found that in some brain disorders, however, including autism and epilepsy, cross-communication can occur between normally distinct brain regions. My theory is that rare forms of creative imagination are the result of an extraordinary convergence of normally disconnected thoughts, memories, feelings and ideas. Indeed, such hyperconnectivity within the brain may well lie at the heart of all forms of exceptional creativity.

Tammet’s insight strongly correlates to evidence that early childhood development is a critical variable in good social outcomes later in life. Good thing Canada canceled its budding daycare program back in 2006.

Full disclosure: I have a personal interest in Tammet’s story because 1) I too had seizures/strokes/undiagnosed brain episodes as a child, 2) I have experienced synesthesia while using hallucinogens, but 3) why do I suck at math? Obviously, my experience pales in comparison, since Tammet’s cognitive wiring and software have developed very distinct outcomes. The best part of Tammet’s story is that while he’s an outlier on humanity’s bell curve today, he could be in the middle ground tomorrow. That little blob of gray matter behind the eyes may yet do some good.

There’s a fascinating interview with Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant best known for reciting 22,514 consecutive digits of Pi. Tammet, though, seems to spurn his categorization as savant, and finds other classifications of intellegient as a poor indications of how people really think:

When I was a child, my behavior was far from being what most people would label “intelligent.” It was often limited, repetitive and antisocial. I could not do many of the things that most people take for granted, such as looking someone in the eye or deciphering a person’s body language, and only acquired these skills with much effort over time. I also struggled to learn many of the techniques for spelling or doing sums taught in class because they did not match my own style of thinking.

I know from my own experience that there is much more to intelligence than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness of one person’s mind or meaningfully describe the nature of his or her potential.

The bell curve distribution for IQ scores tells us that two thirds of the world’s population has an IQ somewhere between 85 and 115. This means that some four and a half billion people around the globe share just 31 numerical values (“he’s a 94,” “you’re a 110,” “I’m a 103”), equivalent to 150 million people worldwide sharing the same IQ score. This sounds a lot to me like astrology, which lumps everyone into one of 12 signs of the zodiac.

Tammet also refers to an interesting ligustic bit, on the gendering of language:

Another finding, by cognitive psychologists Lera Boroditsky, Lauren A. Schmidt and Webb Phillips, might also offer a useful insight into an important part of learning a second language. The researchers asked German and Spanish native speakers to think of adjectives to describe a range of objects, such as a key. The German speakers, for whom the word “key” is masculine, gave adjectives such as “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged” and “metal,” whereas the Spanish speakers, for whom “key” is feminine, gave responses such as “golden,” “little,” “lovely” and “shiny.” This result suggests that native speakers of languages that have gendered nouns remember the different categorization for each by attending to differing characteristics, depending on whether the noun is “male” or “female.” It is plausible that second-language learners could learn to perceive various nouns in a similar way to help them remember the correct gender.

Morning.  I don’t have any news to report.  Do you?  I don’t.  Do you?  No?  You’re sure?  Well, okay then it’s settled.  There’s nothing new going on in the music world today whatsoever.  Cool.

Let’s look backward then.  Do you remember The Vines?  Yeah, you do.  I know you remember this little ditty:

Of course, that’s not actually The Vines playing “Get Free” from 2002’s Highly Evolved but it is definitely one thing: adorable!  However, the real members of The Vines weren’t much older than that at the time of the song’s peak popularity and the band’s quick ascension to the bands-who-have-appeared-on-the-cover-of-Rolling Stone-club.  Yes, it was September 19, 2002 and the headline declared “Rock is Back!”, placing The Vines at the forefront of the garage rock revival alongside The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives, and The Matchbox 20 (I joke obviously, but really if they had added a “the” to their name chances are they would’ve been included just on a formality).  You can see the cover here for a refresher.  I always thought that singer Craig Nicholls looked like Bud Cort in Harold & Maude, if Harold had been stoned out of his mind from morning to midnight, but then I learned Nicholls had a condition known as Asperger’s Syndrome and I felt somewhat guilty for making fun of him.  If you don’t know what Aperger’s Syndrome is you should check out a book called Born on A Blue Day by Daniel Tammet, who has the condition and also happens to be an autistic savant.  An interesting read.  Anyway, back to The Vines.  Here’s another song you may remember from an iPod commercial, but the actual video directed by Michel Gondry is way better:

That’s “Ride” from 2004’s Winning Days.  It doesn’t take a genius to notice that Nicholls is in all likelihood a bit of a Kurt Cobain fan, to say the least.  What’s funny is that I remember when the band first popped up in America they got all kinds of comparisons to Nirvana, but shortly thereafter the thing to do if you were a DJ or music critic was to sort of dismiss this comparison and talk about how The Vines actually had a lot of Beatles influence in their music.  As if this somehow made it more sophisticated or original or what?  I don’t know.  Personally, I’m fine with the Nirvana proximity.  When Cobain was still alive I thought most of the bands that aped that sound sucked, but I was always okay with The Vines and that probably had as much to do with time as anything else.  But for the record – yes – the band actually handles The Beatles territory just fine, so much so that I guess they were asked to contribute a song to that I Am Sam soundtrack that was nothing but Beatles covers.  Here’s their take on “I’m Only Sleeping”:

So what’s going on with these guys?  Well, they released two albums following the aforementioned Winning Days, and it doesn’t seem like either one made much of a dent.  I haven’t heard the music, but mostly I suspect the landscape of what’s popular has just changed in a way that isn’t exactly pining for what The Vines have to offer.  Not to mention, there simply aren’t a whole lot of radio stations that play garage rock stuff in the first place.  The band’s last album, Melodia, was released in the summer of 2008 (but actually comes out next week for those of us here in the States) and sadly the band cancelled most of their scheduled tour last fall due to singer Nicholl’s mental health.  You can read more about that at the band’s website and here’s hoping his status improves.  This is the first single off the album, titled “He’s a Rocker”:

That’s all for today.  More tomorrow…

Daniel Tammet, de Britse asperger, idiot savant en autist,  heeft een nieuw boek uit, De wijde lucht omvatten. Hij vertelt onder meer over zijn lief Jérôme en zijn leven in Avignon.

‘Het cijfer vier is verlegen, net als ik’, Ilse Degryse, De Standaard, 14.03.2009.
Tammet heeft inderdaad zijn plek gevonden. Hij is een bestsellerauteur, bestudeert talen en taalkunde en leeft met zijn vriend Jérome in Avignon. Daar voelt hij zich prettiger dan in Engeland. ‘Ik voel me minder een buitenstaander als ik in het buitenland ben. In Engeland voelde ik me altijd een vreemdeling. Ik heb nooit gevonden dat ik daar thuishoorde.’

Voor zijn seksuele geaardheid uitkomen heeft Tammet nooit moeite gekost. ‘Dat is een van de voordelen van autistisch zijn. Ik heb geen taboes. Ik heb geen antenne voor wat mensen sociaal aanvaardbaar vinden. En voor mij is homo zijn iets heel normaals, gewoon een andere vorm van liefde.’