Born in East London, England, Daniel Tammet was the oldest of nine children in his family. Growing up, Tammet had always been a little different. Instead of playing with the other kids on the playground, he would observe the numbers on the hopscotch squares and marvel at the patterns made by the spiraling leaves on trees.
Then, at the age of four, it was discovered that Daniel could do massive calculations in his head at astonishing speeds. While this may not seem like that extraordinary of feat because fast mental calculations can be taught and enhanced with practice, it is how Daniel does it that makes him extraordinary. You see, Daniel has a condition that scientists call synaesthesia, a neurological aberration in which stimulation in one sensory cortex also leads to stimulation in another sense or cognitive pathway. Thus, in Daniel’s case, he claims to “see” numbers in his head. For him, each number up to 10,000 has a unique shape, colour, size and texture. He describes 289 as a particularly ugly number, 25 as the kind of number you would invite to a party, six as a small nothingness, nine as a towering, intimidating number and pi as simply beautiful.
As a result, unlike the rest of us when we struggle to do mental math calculations in our heads, Daniel doesn’t need to consciously make an effort to solve math equations. For example, when asked to multiply two different numbers together, he describes the experience as seeing two separate entities in his synaesthetic landscape, the answer in the form of a separate entity that emerges as a bridge in between the previous two. Then, based on this new “landscape” of information, Daniel can interpret it to come up with the correct answer.
And this isn’t even the full extent of Tammet’s abilities. Watch the documentary on YouTube (click here) to learn about how he memorized over 20,000 digits of pi, gambled using his intuition in Las Vegas, and learned Icelandic in a mere seven days!
This man is incredible.
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