Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
by Daniel Tammet
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Book Summary Information
Author: Daniel TammetEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-01-09
ISBN: 1416535071
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Book Reviews of Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
Book Review: OMISSIONS
Summary: 5 Stars
The cover to Daniel Tammet's new book has numbers on it. In a font which looks as if they've been type-written. One cannot resist running one's fingers over some of the bulging ones on the cover whilst reading the book, trying to guess what they are. I think the number 9 appears more frequently than any other though perhaps Daniel could tell you that before you can count to 9!
It is with pleasure that I can claim to have known Daniel for well over a decade. We have shared some paradisiacal moments together and argued bitterly over the years but most often because I failed to understand him despite the closeness of our friendship. Almost all good creative artists worth their salt, poets and musicians have lives as socially abnormal outsiders, often leading unreal childhoods doing unusual things and playing unconventional games. I used to be a train running my hand along the playground wall (the edges of its bricks being my track) at school during playtimes picking up invisible passengers along the way. At secondary school during Physical Education lessons Daniel and I would be the last to be picked by the teams and we still never played. I often didn't do PE, forging notes from my parents - I was always the more daring one. I didn't get detentions because never turning up; the teachers thought it no point in giving me one. Instead of running home if I was late for school assemblies I would often stand in the corridor and hear the headmaster out and then join the class once assembly was over.
In fact I am very surprised how similar some of the situations I often found myself in as a child were to Daniel's and how I responded to the feelings I had, something he briefly hints at in his book, but in Daniel it took an exceptional form of mental genius for seeing everything as numerical shapes. That, for me, is what makes Daniel a savant and places him apart from your average creative artist
Pebble-gobbed Demosthenes
Couldn't speak for want of ease
I must admit I do think my own long-term memory is exceptionally good and certainly far better than Daniel's. I can, for instance, recall our first encounter in the school playground and virtually every major detail about all the times we've met since and exactly what was said. I can recall entire conversations, sometimes weeks after I've had them. I know and can recite thousands of lines of poetry by heart and can usually remember them after having read or heard them the first or second time. So some of what for Daniel may be gargantuan accomplishments were second nature to me. But it is Daniel who has brought out this realisation of such abilities within me and I am sure for many others who perhaps do all their thinking as children and then grow up avoiding it like a danger.
`Makind cannot bear too much reality' wrote Eliot. So I don't believe that Kim Peek or Daniel and other savants have the ability to remember everything. Because, I believe there is such a thing as the sub-conscious mind. The only examples from Peek I have seen are his recollection of the date of Queen Victoria's ascension to the throne of England and his working out how old Churchill would've been if he were still living - Not something that one would expect someone not to know, especially someone with a little education, let alone someone who has spent their entire life studying subjects of historical interest. The human mind also has an ability known as Latent Inhibition - To be able to shut out much of what is sensed, a natural filtering system lest we all be experiencing too much and go madder than we already are.
We did not gather in the gymnasium on our first day at school (as Daniel has written) but in the usual assembly hall while the head teacher read out the names of all the pupils and assigned them to their classes. We gathered in the gymnasium on our first day at the upper section of the school. A separate building where the students went after having completed the first 2 years at the lower site. Nor die ever visit Big Ben, Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London. He told me he had visited the Tower a few years before we met with Kevin Fox, Trevor Cooper, Colin Hems and perhaps Terry Ganning - (His classmates from Dorothy Barley School). Daniel was always very reluctant to travel with me on the underground and the few times we did do it, it was to the mosque in Wimbledon - And once with Jens - The tall guy from Germany. We went to Oxford Street and to see the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. It was very unsettling for me and I was often frustrated because there was so much that I wanted to show him in London.
Daniel loves, as Plath (and Chesterton) did `The thinginess of things.' However, in his case it is an extreme form of thinginess (and not meaning to get overly biographical here), this can be described as a kind of Positive Capability that one finds actively at work throughout the years (at least) in which I have known him.
He must remember that beginnings do not always precipitate endings but endings always beginnings and that as one adventure ends, another begins. He must realise that after all joy is fleeting and cannot be grabbed at greedily as a butterfly. He is exceptionally fortunate in that he has parents who have encouraged and nurtured his talents and made him feel something special and unique instead of discouraging, insulting and demoralising him, and that whatever else remains to be corroborated, Daniel will now find his name on a library book which he has written all by himself.
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