Daniel Tammet

Daniel “Danny” Tammet(bornDaniel Paul Corney; 31 January 1979) is an English writer andsavant. His memoir,Born on a Blue Day(2006), is about his early life withAsperger syndromeandsavant syndrome, and was named a "Best Book for Young Adults" in 2008 by theAmerican Library Association'sYoung Adult Library Servicesmagazine.Tammet's second book,Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France's best-selling books of 2009.His third book,Thinking in Numbers, was published in 2012 byHodder & Stoughtonin the United Kingdom and in 2013 byLittle, Brown and Companyin the United States and Canada. Tammet's books have been published in over 20 languages.
Tammet was elected in 2012 to serve as afellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Tammet was born Daniel Paul Corney on 31 January 1979.He was the eldest of nine children and was raised inBarking and Dagenham,East London. As a young child, Tammet hadepileptic seizures, which remitted following medical treatment.
Tammet participated twice in theWorld Memory Championshipsin London under his birth name, placing 11th in 1999 and fourth in 2000.
Tammet changed his birth name bydeed pollbecause "it didn't fit with the way he saw himself". He took theEstoniansurnameTammet, which is related to "oak trees".
At age 25, Tammet was diagnosed withAsperger syndromebySimon Baron-Cohenof theUniversity of CambridgeAutism Research Centre.He is one of fewer than a hundred "prodigious savants" according toDarold Treffert, the world's leading researcher in the study ofsavant syndrome.
Tammet was the subject of a documentary film titledExtraordinary People: The Boy with the Incredible Brain,first broadcast onChannel 4on 23 May 2005.
Tammet met software engineer Neil Mitchell in 2000 and they started a relationship. They lived inKent.He and Mitchell operated the onlinee-learningcompany Optimnem, where they created and published language courses.
Tammet now lives inPariswith his husband Jérôme Tabet, a photographer whom he met while promoting his autobiography.
Tammet is a graduate of theOpen Universitywith aBachelor of Artsdegree withfirst-class honoursin the humanities.
In 2002, Tammet launched the website, Optimnem.The site offered language courses (as of 2015, French and Spanish) and had been an approved member of the UKNational Grid for Learningsince 2006.
The website has been offline since January 2022,as of November 2023 redirecting to a "domain is for sale" page.
Born on a Blue Dayreceived international media attention and critical praise.Booklistmagazine contributing reviewer Ray Olson stated that Tammet's autobiography was "as fascinating asBenjamin Franklin's andJohn Stuart Mill's" and that Tammet wrote "some of the clearest prose this side of Hemingway".Kirkus Reviewsstated that the book "transcends the disability memoir genre".
For his US book tour, Tammet appeared on several television and radio talk shows and specials, including60 Minutesand theLate Show with David Letterman.In February 2007,Born on a Blue Daywas serialised asBBC Radio 4'sBook of the Weekin the United Kingdom.
Tammet's second book,Embracing the Wide Sky, was published in 2009.Allan Snyder, director of theUniversity of SydneyCentre for the Mind, called the work 'an extraordinary and monumental achievement'.Tammet argues that savant abilities are not "supernatural" but "an outgrowth" of "natural, instinctive ways of thinking about numbers and words". He suggests that the brains of savants can to some extent be retrained, and that normal brains could be taught to develop some savant abilities.
Thinking in Numbers, a collection of essays, was first published in 2012 and serialised asBBC Radio 4'sBook of the Weekin the United Kingdom.
Tammet's translation into French of a selection of poetry byLes Murraywas published by L'Iconoclaste in France in 2014.
Tammet's first novel,Mishenka, was published in France and Quebec in 2016.
Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing, a collection of essays on language, was published in the UK, US, and France in 2017.In a review of the book forThe Wall Street Journal,Brad Leithausernoted that "in terms of literary genres, something new and enthralling is going on inside his books" and that the author showed "a grasp of language and a sweep of vocabulary that any poet would envy".
Portraits, a bilingual first poetry collection, was published in French and English in 2018.
Written in French as a letter to a non-believing friend, the creative non-fiction workFragments de paradis("Fragments of Heaven") was published in France and Canada in 2020.
After the World Memory Championships, Tammet participated in a group study, later published in the New Year 2003 edition ofNature Neuroscience.The researchers investigated the reasons for the memory champions' superior performance. They reported that he used "strategies for encoding information with the sole purpose of making it more memorable", and concluded that superior memory was not driven by exceptional intellectual ability or differences in brain structure.
In another study, Baron-Cohen and others at the Autism Research Centre tested Tammet's abilities in around 2005.Tammet was found to havesynaesthesia, according to the "Test of Genuineness-Revised", which tests the subjects' consistency in reporting descriptions of their synaesthesia. He performed well on tests of short-term memory (with adigit-spanof 11.5, where 6.5 is typical). Conversely, test results showed his memory for faces scored at the level expected of a 6- to 8-year-old child in this task. The authors of the study speculated that his savant memory could be a result of synaesthesia combined withAsperger syndrome, or it could be the result ofmnemonicstrategies.
In a further study published inNeurocasein 2008, Baron-Cohen, Bor, and Billington investigated whether Tammet's synaesthesia and Asperger syndrome explained his savant memory abilities. They concluded that his abilities might be explained by hyperactivity in one brain region (the leftprefrontal cortex), which results from his Asperger syndrome and synaesthesia.On theNavon task, relative to non-autistic controls, Tammet was found to be faster at finding a target at the local level and to be less distracted by interference from the global level.In anfMRIscan, "Tammet did not activate extra-striate regions of the brain normally associated with synaesthesia, suggesting that he has an unusual and more abstract and conceptual form of synaesthesia".Published inCerebral Cortex(2011), an fMRI study led by Jean-Michel Hupé at theUniversity of Toulouse(France) observed no activation of colour areas in ten synaesthetes.Hupé suggests that synaesthetic colour experience lies not in the brain's colour system, but instead results from "a complex construction of meaning in the brain, involving not only perception, but language, memory and emotion".
In his bookMoonwalking with Einstein(2011),Joshua Foer, a science journalist and former US Memory Champion, speculates that Tammet's study of conventional mnemonic approaches has played a role in the savant's feats of memory. While accepting that Tammet meets the standard definition of aprodigious savant, Foer suggests that his abilities may simply reflect intensive training using memory techniques, rather than any abnormal psychology or neurology. In a review of his book forThe New York Times, psychologistAlexandra Horowitzdescribed Foer's speculation as among the few "missteps" in his book. She questioned whether it would matter if Tammet had used such strategies or not.
Tammet has been studied  by researchers in Britain and the United States, and has been the subject of several peer-reviewedscientific papers.Allan Snyderat theAustralian National Universityhas said of him: "Savants can't usually tell us how they do what they do. It just comes to them. Daniel can describe what he sees in his head. That's why he's exciting. He could be theRosetta Stone."
In his mind, Tammet says, eachpositive integerup to 10,000 has its own unique shape, colour, texture and feel. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, andpi, though not an integer, as beautiful. The number 6 apparently has no distinct image yet what he describes as an almost small nothingness, opposite to the number 9, which he says is large, towering, and quite intimidating. Tammet describes the number 117 as "a handsome number. It's tall, it's a lanky number, a little bit wobbly."He describedDavid Lettermanwith the number 117 in these terms when interviewed on theLate Show with David Letterman.In his memoir, Tammet describes undergoing a synaesthetic and emotional response for numbers and words.
Tammet set the European record forreciting pi from memoryon 14 March 2004 – recounting to 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes.He revealed in a French talk show on Radio Classique on 29 April 2016, that this event inspiredKate Bush's song "Pi" from her albumAerial.
Tammet is apolyglot. InBorn on a Blue Day, he writes that he knows 10 languages: English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Lithuanian, Esperanto, Spanish, Romanian, Icelandic, and Welsh.InEmbracing the Wide Sky, Tammet wrote that he learned conversational Icelandic in a week, and appeared on an interview onKastljósonRÚVspeaking the language.
Mänti (/ˈmænti/,MAN-tee) is aconstructed languagethat Tammet published in 2006.The wordMänticomes from the Finnish word for "pine tree" (mänty,pronounced[ˈmænty]). Mänti uses vocabulary and grammar from the Finnic languages.