Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder whose clinical expression can be very disabling, since it causes cognitive, communicative and behavioral disorders. In addition, all of them frequently coexist with some degree of intellectual disability.

In a small percentage of cases, those who suffer from it (generally men) live with the aforementioned difficulty but also with some extraordinarily developed capacity. Those who present this combination are known as savant (wise man’s syndrome).

In this disorder, the person usually maintains his or her verbal ability, so they are considered high-functioning autistics (Asperger’s in the DSM-IV-TR diagnostic manual). In fact, many people have the ability to learn multiple languages effortlessly and in record time.

In this article we will deal with the figure of Daniel Tammet, one of these rare savants . His case is tremendously particular, since his extraordinary aptitude is oriented both to mathematics and to languages.

Who is Daniel Tammet?

Daniel Tammet is a British mathematician born in 1979, who was identified at the age of 25 as savant by the prestigious Simon Baron-Cohen, professor at the University of Cambridge. He is an exceptional case of a prodigious savant, of whom only a few dozen have been documented worldwide, and who is characterized by the extraordinary development of more than one cognitive function along with the preservation of intelligence (which often exceeds the upper limits of normality).

He grew up in London and is the first of nine children, from a humble British family that for years was forced to subsist on the charity of acquaintances and charities. His childhood was marked not only by the social limitations of autism, but also by the onset of other serious illnesses (such as epilepsy) that persistently changed the way he thought about and processed his reality.

A lot has been written about his life and work, even though he is still a very young person. For many years he has been visiting various universities in both Europe and North America, sharing his experiences with hundreds of students and giving faithful witness to his divergent thinking. Several documentaries about him have also been filmed and broadcast on television, emphasizing his life and the particular way in which his childhood brain developed.

Getting to know Daniel Tammet involves discovering the concrete way in which his mind works. For this reason, we will proceed to discuss the issue from now on, abounding especially in a key concept for its understanding: synaesthesia.

1. The first years

The birth of Daniel Tammet was a great event for his parents, as he was the first of many other children to come. The economic situation they were going through was not the best, but they had a vibrant desire to enter the stage of parenthood, so it was a rewarding and expected event for this young couple. They would soon be surprised, however, that their son seemed to be crying incessantly, and that he did not respond to their attempts to alleviate the grief that apparently overwhelmed him.

This circumstance arose practically from the first moment in which he arrived in the world, and involved regular visits to paediatric specialists. This was undoubtedly an early sign of his autism, although it could not be diagnosed by the doctors of the time. It is necessary to consider that at twelve months she had developed the expected motor milestones and was formulating her first words, something that did not fit in with the way this disorder was conceived at that time (limited to Leo Kanner’s criteria).

The playful activities of little Daniel Tammet lacked any symbolic aspect , and by the time he entered the nursery he tended to withdraw into a solitary space and display behaviours that his teachers would judge as repetitive and without apparent purpose. He spent many hours frolicking in a sandbox in the playground of that center, absorbed in each of the grains that slid between his tiny fingers. The rest of the children were only the background for his restrictive interests, so he did not notice them.

Also at that time she expressed self-stimulating behaviors such as gently banging her head against the wall of her house or daycare center, as well as rhythmically swinging when she felt happy or joyful. During this chapter of his life he developed a certain stiffness in his manner of acting, for he could not use any other cutlery than his own or hang his coat on any other rack than the one he had assigned to himself at school.

His younger brothers, who were gradually coming into the world, were no source of joy or interest to him. Although he came to share a room with quite a few of them over the years, Daniel Tammet always seemed to feel distant from the life that the rest of the family was building together, showing a marked preference for solitude (looking through books with brightly coloured drawings or simply watching the way in which the white light of the sun shattered into a thousand colours as it passed through the crystalline prism of his window).

2. An unexpected event

When he was just two years old, Daniel Tammet experienced an event that would change his life forever. While at home he suffered an epileptic seizure, with a focus of activity located in the temporal lobe of the left brain hemisphere . This is a more common problem in children with autism than in the general population, but it was a serious setback that almost cost him his life.

The hospitalization was prolonged for several days. After the corresponding examination, carbamazepine (an anticonvulsant drug) was prescribed and a diagnosis was made of a severe epileptic seizure that had even restricted the supply of oxygen (since he already had cyanotic lips in the emergency department). The accident could have been a turning point in the way Daniel Tammet processed information. Luckily that was his first and last attack, but something had changed forever in a deep corner of his nervous system.

3. An extraordinary ability for numbers

The studies that have been carried out to date, concerning the way the brain of people with a savant syndrome works, indicate that a lesion in the temporal region of the left hemisphere could be at the base of neuroplastic changes aimed at the right taking more control of the situation . Although the exact mechanism is largely unknown, it seems that this triggers novel ways of articulating neurological processes that result in a superlative development of compensatory cognitive functions.

In this sense, Daniel Tammet began to live with synaesthesia. It is a rare symptom that consists of the perception of a concrete stimulus in a different sensory modality than the one that would correspond to it by its physical properties (like seeing sounds or listening to objects). In this particular case, the phenomenon would involve very specially the numbers, in such a particular way that it supposed (from that moment and until the present time) the foundation for an extraordinary capacity of arithmetic calculation and mathematical reasoning.

Daniel Tammet is able to assign each number totally unique physical properties, differentiating them from one another. Thus, some would be very large (like nine) and others tiny (like six). They would also be elegant (like three) and full of edges (like four). He even distinguishes the numbers according to the way their surface looks to the touch, having them rough and smooth. In this way, each number awakens in him a totally different set of emotions.

It is important to note that this capability is not limited to simple numbers only, but it does so for all possible numbers in the known universe. For example, 333 would be nice, while 289 might be unpleasant (to the eye, ear or touch). Your favorite numbers would be the prime numbers (which can only be divided by themselves or by unity), because you would feel them as soft as “polished pebbles in a stream. He would also find those with decimals kind, to the point that today he holds the European record for the recitation of the pi (with 22,514 digits).

All these sensations contribute to the fact that he can make mathematical calculations that are impossible for ordinary mortals, since he performs a concatenation of mental operations (fusion, dissolution, etc.) in which all the physical properties that he assigns to numbers participate. In this way he “feels” them even before he has calculated them, recognizing and pronouncing them within a landscape that he himself is capable of generating inside his head.

4. An exceptional verbal ability

Daniel Tammet, apart from being a mathematical genius, has a perfect command of eleven different languages (and has even designed his own, known as Mänty) , of which his favourite is Estonian (because of the richness of its vowels). His synaesthetic ability also extends to the words themselves, to which he attributes properties (colour, sound, etc.) according to the way in which his graphemes are organised. In this way, a word can completely change its feeling when a suffix or a prefix is added to it.

This ability also originated in Tammet’s childhood, as there was a particular period when he compulsively wrote on rolls of paper. The activity kept him away from reality for hours, and for him it was a very rich stimulus and pregnant with nuances among which to delight. There is an anecdote about how in his adult life he learned to speak Finnish in just seven days, with the aim of passing a test that prepared him for a documentary he starred in.

He currently gives language classes and has a website dedicated to this purpose. His literary production is also very important, as he has written or collaborated in a total of six works: Nacido en un día azul (2006), Abrazando el ancho cielo (2009), Islas de genios (prologue, 2010), Pensando en números (2012), C’est une chose sérieuse que d’être parmi les hommes (2014) and La conquista del cerebro (2017).

Bibliographic references:

  • Hughes, J., Ward, J., Gruffydd, D., Baron-Cohen, S., Smith, P., Alison, C. and Simner, J. (2018). Savant syndrome has a distinct psychological profile in autism. Molecular Autism, 9:53.
  • Treffert, D.A. (2009). The savant syndrome: an extraordinary condition. A synopsis: past, present and future. Philosophical Transactions B, 363(1522), 1351-1357.