topics: |  math | synesthesia | autism | |

Daniel Tammet is a high-functioning autist - Asperger Syndrome - he can't distinguish left from right, and he can't drive, but other than that he doesn't seem to experience too many deficits that many other autists have. Most importantly, he has a conscious description for some of his thoughts as he is dealing with numbers.

Every number upto 1000 and all primes upto 10K and any string of digits appearing in the sequence of pi - have colours, shapes and an emotion for him.

the number 2 is floating, moving from left to right. 6 is small, not very friendly. 9 is tall and intimidating. all primes are rounded, like pebbles.

A calendar of colours

The "blue day" in the title is a Wednesday - all Wednesday's are blue. Days of the week are coloured, and so are musical tones, and of course, numbers.

Allan Snyder at the Australian National University has said of Tammet:

 
	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
	the 'Rosetta Stone'.

So how does Daniel describe "what he sees in his head"?  Here is
an illustration.  

Daniel describes the process by which he computes with numbers as that of
of "seeing" their shapes.  All numbers upto a thousand and many more beyond
them have colours and shapes.  Daniel also paints, and can thereby explain
some of these numbers he visualizes.  Here is how the digits of pi fit in:

So this is what he means by "seeing" answers.

Lessons for Machine Learning : Synesthetic robots?

While AI and Machine Learning have been profoundly inspired by cognition
and neuroscience, usually we simulate only at the "normal" processes in the
brain.  

Here is an example where the brain is doing things differently, and
there is no reason why we should not be building machines that can have this
kind of multi-modal integration.   

Some functions would call for some types of cross-wiring, other functions may
not.

So are we looking at an age of synesthetic robots? 


	Neural pathways (block diagram) for motion left) and form (right)
	in the macaque visual system (Van Essen & Gallant, 1994). 
	Brain centers on vision to motor pathways (Thorpe&Thorpe 01)
	While inspiration for deep learning etc comes from some aspects of such
	neural pathways, the circuits in the brains of savants may suggest other
	architectures!

Reciting the digits of pi

Daniel once recited 25 thousand digits of pi.  
This is part of how he does it. 

	
	The first 20 digits of pi.  "I take the colors and the emotions and
	the textures and I pull them all together into a kind of rolling
	numerical landscape.
	Image from his TED talk, where he says that perception may be more complex 
	than realized so far.


[
The record for memorizing digits of π, certified by Guinness World Records,
is 67,890 digits, recited in China by Lu Chao in 24 hours and 4 minutes on 20
November 2005.  In 2006, [Japan Times] reported that Akira Haraguchi, a
retired Japanese engineer, had recited pi to 100,000 decimal places, a
claim was submitted to Guinness World Records, but it has neither confirmed
nor denied it.

All but the second of the four records for the number of pi digits he has so
far recited in the presence of witnesses — 54,000 in Sept. 2004, 68,000 in
Dec. 2004, 83,431 in July 2005 and the 100,000 digits in
October. 

he has always found pi fascinating.

“I had always felt that it was divine somehow,” Haraguchi said recently at
his home in Chiba. “In fact I was secretly chanting pi numbers at funerals,
as if I were chanting a Buddhist sutra.”

	from Japan Times 2006
]

Foreword by Dr Darold Treffert

Daniel’s ability with numbers is incredible. If you ask him to multiply 37
to the power of 4 he will give you almost instantly -
1,874,161. Ask him to divide 13 by 97 and he will give you the answer to
over 100 decimal places if you wish. He out-distances the ordinary
calculator instantly and without effort. You’ll need a computer to see if
he is correct. And of course he is correct.

the number 2 is floating, moving from left to right. 6 is small, not very friendly. 9 is tall and intimidating. all primes are rounded, like pebbles.

Then there is his ability to learn an entire new language – grammar, inflection and comprehension in only one week. The documentary Brainman, first broadcast in the U.K. in 2005, charts Daniel’s mastery of Icelandic in such a brief time, culminating in a live interview on television using his newly acquired language in a sprightly interaction with his Icelandic TV hosts.

Of special interest for me, though, is not just what Daniel can so
extraordinarily do, but rather his capacity to describe how he does it. Such
first-person explanations of savant abilities are extremely rare, in fact
nearly non-existent. Most books are written by others... [and not] by the
person who has those special skills.

Daniel tells us that his synaesthesia began after a series of childhood
epileptic seizures. This, for me, puts him into the “acquired” savant
category – people who develop savant-like abilities, sometimes at a
prodigious level, following some central nervous system trauma, disease or
disorder. The “acquired” savant raises important questions about hidden
potential, perhaps, dormant within us all, and about how to tap that
potential without traumatic event. By studying Daniel more closely –
something he is very willing to participate in – we may come closer to
being able to tap the “little Rainman” that exists, perhaps, within us all.

Daniel has also been given a diagnosis of high functioning autism, or
Asperger’s Disorder as well, a condition he writes openly about. In
contrast to the more prominent symptoms and behaviours he displayed as a
child, though, his present very high level of functioning underscores his
observation that he has “outgrown” some of his autism. Such progress does
occur, fortunately, in some other people on the autistic spectrum, as they
grow older. 

Daniel says that numbers are his friends. Indeed in his early childhood they
seemed to be his only friends. But now Daniel is seeking out and making new
friends – literally all over the world. Friendship is reciprocal though. And
one comes away from his book – or at least I did – with the feeling, through
his openness, candor and reaching out, of having made a new friend as well.

Darold A. Treffert, M.D.
Scientific adviser on the film Rainman

Foreword by Simon Baron-Cohen

“How rare is it to have synaesthesia? It occurs in less than 1% of the
population. And how rare is it to have an autism spectrum condition? Again,
less than 1% of the population has such a condition. In Daniel Tammet, these
two states co-occur and if we assume they are independent, the probability of
someone having both synaesthesia and autism is vanishingly small – about 1 in
10,000. ...

His synaesthesia gives him a richly textured, multi-sensory form of memory,
and his autism gives him the narrow focus on number and syntactic
patterns. The resulting book is a story of a life that is both remarkable and
inspiring.”    -  Simon Baron-Cohen, Cambridge University

Excerpts

ch 1 : Blue Nines and Red Words

I was born on 31 January 1979 – a Wednesday. I know it was a Wednesday,
because the date is blue in my mind and Wednesdays are always blue, like the
number nine or the sound of loud voices arguing. I like my birth date,
because of the way I’m able to visualise most of the numbers in it as smooth
and round shapes, similar to pebbles on a beach. That’s because they are
prime numbers: 31, 19, 197, 97, 79 and 1979 are all divisible only by
themselves and one (only 979 is composite). 

I can recognise every prime up to 9973 by their ‘pebble-like’ quality. It’s
just the way my brain works. p.1

I have a rare condition known as savant syndrome, little known before its
portrayal by actor Dustin Hoffman in the Oscar-winning 1988 film Rain
Man.Like Hoffman’s character, Raymond Babbitt, I have an almost obsessive
need for order and routine, which affects virtually every aspect of my
life. For example, I eat exactly 45 grams of porridge for breakfast each
morning; I weigh the bowl with an electronic scale to make sure. Then I count
the number of items of clothing I’m wearing before I leave my house. I get
anxious if I can’t drink my cups of tea at the same time each day. Whenever I
become too stressed and I can’t breathe properly, I close my eyes and
count. Thinking of numbers helps me to become calm again.

Numbers are my friends and they are always around me. Each one is unique and
has its own personality. Eleven is friendly and five is loud, whereas four is
both shy and quiet – it’s my favourite number, perhaps because it reminds me
of myself. Some are big – 23, 667, 1179 – while others are small: 6, 13,
581. Some are beautiful, like 333, and some are ugly, like 289. To me, every
number is special.

In an interview with chat show host David Letterman in New York, I told David
he looked like the number 117 – tall and lanky. Later outside, in the
appropriately numerically named Times Square, I gazed up at the towering
skyscrapers and felt surrounded by nines – the number I most associate with
feelings of immensity.

Synesthesia

Scientists call my visual, emotional experience of numbers synaesthesia, a
rare neurological mixing of the senses, which most commonly results in the
ability to see alphabetical letters and/or numbers in colour. Mine is an
unusual and complex type, through which I see numbers as shapes, colours,
textures and motions. The number one, for example, is a brilliant and bright
white, like someone shining a torch beam into my eyes. Five is a clap of
thunder or the sound of waves crashing against rocks. Thirty-seven is lumpy
like porridge, while eighty-nine reminds me of falling snow.



	ONE (1) is like a flash of bright light. TWO is floating, 
	moving from left to right.  FOUR is both shy and
	quiet – it's his favourite.  FIVE is loud, SIX is sad and tiny,
	NINE is tall and intimidating. ELEVEN is friendly...
	Each chapter is headed by one of these figures...

"Looking up" answers

I never write anything down when I’m calculating, because I’ve always been
able to do the sums in my head and it’s much easier for me to visualise the
answer using my synaesthetic shapes than to try to follow the ‘carry the one’
techniques taught in the textbooks we are given at school. When multiplying,
I see the two numbers as distinct shapes. The image changes and a third shape
emerges – the correct answer. The process takes a matter of seconds and
happens spontaneously. It’s like doing maths without having to think.  p.5

	
	Daniel has done a painting to show how he multiplies 53 by 131 - both
	are primes - each number has a 3-D shape and the gap in between has
	the unique shape of the answer number - 6943.  Also from the TED talk:
	Different ways of Knowing.
	For Tammet, he only has to to imagine it to visualize the answer. 


It's a multiplication of two prime numbers. Three-dimensional shapes and the
space they create in the middle creates a new shape, the answer to the
sum. 

What about bigger numbers? Well you can't get much bigger than Pi, the
mathematical constant. It's an infinite number -- literally goes on
forever. In this painting that I made of the first 20 decimals of Pi, I take
the colors and the emotions and the textures and I pull them all together
into a kind of rolling numerical landscape.

In the illustration above I’m multiplying 53 by 131. I see both numbers as
a unique shape and locate each spatially opposite the other. The space
created between the two shapes creates a third, which I perceive as a new
number: 6,943, the solution to the sum.

ch4 : School - No concept of deception

A story that really affected me was ‘Stone Soup’. In it, a wandering
soldier arrives in a village asking for food and shelter. The villagers,
greedy and fearful, provide none, so the soldier declares that he will make
them stone soup with nothing required but a cauldron, water and a stone. The
villagers huddle round as the soldier begins to cook his dish, licking his
lips in anticipation. 

‘Of course, stone soup with cabbage is hard to beat,’ says the soldier to
himself in a loud voice. One of the villagers approaches and puts one of his
cabbages into the pot. Then the soldier says: ‘Once I had stone soup with
cabbage and a bit of salt beef and it was fit for a king!’ Sure enough, the
village butcher brings some salt beef and one by one the other villagers
provide potatoes, onions, carrots, mushrooms, and so on until a delicious
meal is ready for the entire village.  56

I found the story very puzzling at the time because I had no concept of
deception and did not understand that the soldier was pretending to make a
soup from a stone in order to trick the villagers into contributing to
it. Only many years later did I finally understand what the story was about.

There were lots of things that I found difficult, like brushing my teeth. The
scratchy noise of teeth being brushed was physically painful to me, and when
I walked past the bathroom I would have to put my hands over my ears and wait
for the noise to stop before I could do anything else.

Learning how to tie my shoelaces was just as much of a problem for
me. However hard I tried, I just could not get my hands to perform the
manoeuvres shown to me over and over again by my parents. Eventually my
mother bought me a toy – a large Mother Hubbard boot with thick, coarse
shoelaces – to help me practise. I spent many hours practising, often until
my hands were red and itching from prolonged contact with the boot’s
laces. In the meantime, my father did my shoes up for me every morning before
taking me to school. I was eight before I finally mastered my laces. 

Then there was the problem of telling left from right (something I have to
concentrate to remember to this day). Not only did my father have to tie my
laces until I was eight, he also had to put my shoes on for me
first. Sometimes I got frustrated when I tried to put the shoes on myself
and would throw them in the heat of a tantrum. My parents had the idea of
putting labels – marked ‘L’ and ‘R’ – on each shoe. It worked and I was
then finally able to put my shoes on by myself and to understand simple
directions a lot better than before.

ch 6 : Adolescence - Probability

Probability is something that many people find unintuitive. For example, the
answer to the problem ‘A woman has two children, one of whom is a girl. What
is the probability that the other child is also a girl?’ is not 1 in 2, but 1
in 3. This is because, knowing that the woman already has a girl and
therefore cannot have two boys, the remaining possibilities are: BG (boy and
girl), GB (girl and boy) and GG (girl and girl). 107

The ‘Three Cards Problem’ is another example of a probability question
producing an apparently counterintuitive solution. Imagine there are three
cards: one is red on both sides, one is white on both sides, and the third is
red on one side and white on the other. A person puts the cards into a bag
and randomly mixes them together, before pulling one out and putting it face
up on the table. A red side is showing – what is the probability that the
other side is also red? 

Some versions of this problem point out that as there are only two cards with
red sides, one with a second red side and the other with a white side, the
odds would appear to be 1 in 2, i.e. the other side of the card is equally
likely to be red or white. 

However, the actual probability that the other side of the card is also red
is 2 in 3. To picture this, imagine writing the letter ‘A’ on one side of the
card with two red sides, and ‘B’ on its other side. On the card with one red
side and one white side, imagine writing the letter ‘C’ on its red side. Now
consider the situation where a card is drawn showing a red side. The
possibilities are that it is red sides ‘A’, ‘B’ or ‘C’. ...
Therefore the odds of a red side under the one showing are 2 in 3.

ch 9 : Gift of tongues

William Shakespeare was a frequent user of metaphors; many of which are
synaesthetic, involving a link to the senses. For example, in Hamlet,
Shakespeare has the character Francisco say that it is ‘bitter cold’ –
combining the sensation of coldness with the taste of bitterness. In another
play, The Tempest, Shakespeare goes beyond metaphors involving only the
senses and links concrete experiences with more abstract ideas. His
expression: ‘This music crept by me upon the waters,’ connects the abstract
‘music’ with a creeping action. The reader is able to imagine music –
something normally very difficult to create a mental picture of – as a moving
animal. 178

[the idea of the "synaesthetic metaphor" has been suggested by V.S. Ramachandran]

Professor VS Ramachandran: Our language is replete with what we might call
	synaesthetic metaphors, where you are sort of linking different
	sensory systems in metaphorical usage. As, for example, you say loud
	shirt. My shirt's not making any noise, why do you call it loud
	shirt, you instantly understand what I'm talking about. It heightens
	your appreciation of its vivid colour. Or when you say cheddar cheese
	is sharp. Obviously, cheese isn't sharp, if you rub it on your skin
	it's soft but then you say well no no no, I mean it tastes sharp but
	there's a circularity and we're using a tactile adjective to describe
	a taste.
		- BBC Horizon Shakespeare and the Invention of Metaphor

---

When Shakespeare writes ‘It is the East and Juliet is the sun’, our brains
instantly understand this. You don’t say, ‘Juliet is the sun. Does that mean
she is a glowing ball of fire?’ (Schizophrenics might say this; they often
interpret metaphors literally). Instead, your brain instantly forms the right
links, ‘She is warm like the sun, nurturing like the sun, radiant like the
sun’ and so on.  How is this achieved?
	 	- from V.S. Ramachandran, E.M. Hubbard etal, J. Consciousness
		Studies, v.8(12), 2001, pp. 3–34 
		Synaesthesia — A Window Into Perception, Thought and language

also see this blog: The Key to Artistic Creativity: Synesthesia, the Mind’s Metaphor
	

Esperanto

The Esperanto language (the word means ‘one who hopes’) was the creation of
Dr Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, an eye doctor from Bialystok in what is now
Poland. He first published his language in 1887 and the first world congress
of Esperanto speakers was held in France in 1905. Zamenhof’s goal was to
create an easy-to-learn universal second language to help foster
international understanding. Today, there are estimated to be somewhere
between 100,000 and 1,000,000 Esperanto speakers worldwide.

Esperanto’s grammar has several interesting features. The first is that the
different parts of speech are marked by their own suffixes: all nouns end in
-o, all adjectives in -a, adverbs in -e, infinitives in -i. For example: the
word rapido would translate as ‘speed’, rapida as ‘quick’, rapide as
‘quickly’ and rapidi as ‘to hurry’.

Verbs do not change for the subject, as in most natural languages: mi estas
(‘I am’), vi estas (‘you are’), li estas (‘he is’), i estas (‘she is’), ni
estas (‘we are’), ili estas (‘they are’). Past tense verbs always end in -is
(mi estis – ‘I was’), future tense in -os (vi estos – ‘you will be’).

Many of Esperanto’s words are formed using affixes – the ending ‘-ejo’, for
example, signifies ‘place’, as in the words: lernejo (‘school’), infanejo
(‘nursery’) and trinkejo (‘bar’). Another commonly used suffix is ‘-ilo’,
meaning ‘tool or instrument’, and is found in words such as: hakilo (‘axe’),
flugilo (‘wing’) and serilo (‘search engine’).

Perhaps the most famous feature of Esperanto’s word-building grammar is its
use of the prefix ‘mal-’ to indicate the opposite of something. This feature
is used extensively throughout the language: bona (‘good’) – malbona
(‘evil’), ria (‘rich’) – malria (‘poor’), granda (‘big’) – malgranda
(‘small’), dekstra (‘right’) – maldekstra (‘left’), fermi (‘to close’) –
malfermi (‘to open’), amiko (‘friend’) – malamiko (‘enemy’).

The creation and use of idiomatic speech is generally discouraged in
Esperanto, however some examples of ‘Esperanto slang’ do exist. A new learner
of the language might be called a frebakito from the German frischgebacken
(‘fresh-baked’), where the standard Esperanto word would be a komencanto
(‘beginner’). An example of an Esperanto euphemism is la necesejo (‘the
necessary place’) for a bathroom/WC. 183

Neologisms

Tony Attwood, a clinical psychologist and author of Asperger’s Syndrome: A
Guide for Parents and Professionals, notes that some individuals with
Asperger’s have the ability to create their own form of language (known as
neologisms). He gives as examples a girl’s description of her ankle as ‘the
wrist of my foot’ and ice cubes as ‘water bones’.

After the birth of my twin sisters I created the word biplets to describe
them... (analogue from triplets) Another of my childhood neologisms was 
the word pramble meaning to go out for a ramble with a baby
in a pram; something my parents did frequently.

For several years as a child I tinkered with the idea of creating my own
language, as a way of relieving the loneliness I often felt and to draw on
the delight I experienced in words. Sometimes, when I felt a particularly
strong emotion or experienced something that I felt was especially beautiful,
a new word would spontaneously form in my mind to express it and I had no
idea where those words came from. In contrast, I often found the language of
my peers jarring and confusing. I was regularly teased for speaking in long,
careful and overly formal sentences. When I tried to use one of my own
created words in conversation, to express something of what I was feeling or
experiencing inside, it was rarely understood. My parents discouraged me from
‘talking in a funny way’.

I continued to dream that one day I would speak a language that was my own,
that I would not be teased or reprimanded for using and that would express
something of what it felt to be me. After leaving school I found I had the
time to begin seriously to pursue such an idea. I wrote words down as they
occurred to me and experimented with different methods of pronunciation and
sentence building. I called my language ‘Mänti’ (pronounced ‘man-tee’) from
the Finnish word mänty meaning pine tree. Pines are native to most of the
Northern hemisphere and are particularly numerous across parts of Scandinavia
and the Baltic region. Many of the words used in Mänti are of Scandinavian
and Baltic origin. There is another reason for the choice of name: pine trees
often grow together in large numbers and symbolise friendship and community.

Mänti is a work in progress with a developed grammar and a vocabulary of more
than a thousand words. It has attracted the interest of several language
researchers who believe it may help shed more light on my linguistic
abilities.

ch10 : Reciting Pi

In 2004, Tammet attempted to recite the digits of pi.  On March 14 (Pi day
- also Einstein's birthday),  

Mnemonic poem - remember pi to 30 digits (from 1905): 

		Sir, I send a rhyme excelling
		In sacred truth and rigid spelling
		Numerical sprites elucidate
		For me the lexicon’s dull weight
		If Nature gain
		Not you complain,
		Tho’ Dr Johnson fulminate.

mnemonic upto 14 digits: 
	How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures
	involving quantum mechanics!

...

I reached 10,000 digits at quarter past one in the afternoon, just over two
hours from the start of the recitation.

There was, in the end, only one point at which I momentarily thought I might
not be able to continue. It was after reaching 16,600 digits that for just a
few moments my mind went completely blank: no shapes, no colours, no
textures, nothing. I hadn’t ever experienced anything like it before, as
though I was looking into a black hole. I closed my eyes tight and took
several deep breaths, then I felt a tingling in my head and from the darkness
the colours started to flow again and I continued to recite as before.

At exactly quarter past four, my voice shaking with relief, I recited the
last digits: ‘67657486953587’ and signalled that I had finished. I had
recited 22,514 digits of pi without error in a time of 5 hours and 9 minutes
to set a new British and European record. 

ch11 : Brainman : the Documentary

	[The publicity from the pi recital results in a TV channel making a
	documentary ("Brainman", YouTube link below) on him.  For the
	shooting, he is taken to Salt Lake city to meet Kim Peek, the
	legendary savant who was the inspiration for Rainman.  He also
	interacts with neuroscientists at UCSD, gambles at Las Vegas, and
	learns Icelandic (ch.11).  ]

Kim Peek

Kim Peek is a miracle. When he was born in 1951, doctors told his parents that he would never walk or learn and that they should put him in an institution. Kim was born with an enlarged head and a water blister inside his skull that damaged the left hemisphere, the side of the brain involved in such critical areas as speech and language.

A 1988 scan by neuroscientists found that he had no corpus callosum, the membrane separating the brain’s two hemispheres. Yet he was able to read at sixteen months and completed the high school curriculum by age fourteen.

Kim has memorised a vast amount of information from more than a dozen subjects over the years, ranging from history and dates to literature, sports, geography and music. He can read two pages of a book simultaneously, one with each eye, with near perfect retention. Kim has read more than 9,000 books altogether and can recall their entire content. He is also a gifted calendrical calculator.

Kim's father, Fran Peek, who looks after him: 

	We visit places like schools, colleges and hospitals. Kim can tell
	them almost anything they want to know: dates, names, statistics,
	zip codes, you name it. The audience asks him all sorts of questions
	and he always comes out with so much information, more than I ever
	knew he knew. He hardly ever gets stuck for an answer. His message
	is this: "You don’t have to be disabled to be different, because
	everybody’s different."

[Kim is unable to do simple things such as turn on the lights or dress
himself.  His father looks after all the details of his life. ]

In 1984, Kim and his father met producer and screenwriter Barry Morrow at a
conference meeting of the Association of Retarded Citizens in Arlington,
Texas. The result was the movie Rain Man. Dustin Hoffman spent the day with
Kim and was so awed by his abilities that he urged Fran to share his son
with the world. Since that time, Kim and his father have criss-crossed the
US and talked to more than a million people.

[Later, Hoffman presented Peek with the Oscar statuette that he had won
for the movie.]

Fran spoke with passion about the reaction of the doctors to his young son’s
problems: ‘We were told to put him in an institution and forget about him.’
A brain surgeon even offered to lobotomise Kim to make it easier to
institutionalise him.

I was able to walk with Kim alone around the different shelves of the
library. Kim held my hand as we walked. ‘You’re a savant like me, Daniel,’
he said excitedly and he squeezed my hand.

Kim Peek as a split-brain savant

	Article by Berit Brogaard : Kim Peek, The Real Rain Man - Low IQ, extraordinary mind
	from Psychology Today 2012

Unlike many individuals with savant syndrome, Kim Peek was not afflicted
with autistic spectrum disorder. Though he was strongly introverted, he did
not have difficulties with social understanding and communication. The main
cause of his remarkable abilities seems to have been the lack of connections
between his brain's two hemispheres. An MRI scan (link is external) revealed
an absence of the corpus callosum, the anterior commissure and the
hippocampal commissure, the parts of the neurological system that transfer
information between hemispheres. In some sense Kim was a natural born
split-brain patient.  

[patients with severe forms of epilepsy may undergo split-brain surgery,
after which the epilepsy is relieved, but some of these symptoms may arise. ]

Michael Gazzaniga and Roger W. Sperry, the first to study split brains in
humans, found that several patients who had undergone a complete calloscotomy
suffered from split-brain syndrome. In patients with split-brain syndrome the
right hemisphere, which controls the left hand and foot, acts independently
of the left hemisphere and the patient’s ability to make rational decisions.

This can give rise to a kind of split		personality, in which the left
hemisphere gives orders that reflect the person’s rational goal, whereas the
right hemisphere issues conflicting demands that reveal hidden preferences.

One of Gazzaniga and Sperry's patients pulled down his pants with the left
hand and back up with the right in a continuing struggle. On a different
occasion, this same patient's left hand made an attempt to strike the
unsuspecting wife as the right hand grabbed the villainous limb to stop it.

Another of their patients, Paul S, had a fully functional language center in
both hemispheres. This allowed the researchers to question each side of
Paul's brain. When they asked the right side what their patient wanted to be
when he grew up, he replied "an automobile racer." When they posed the same
question to the left, however, he responded "a draftsman."

Kim Peek : Split brain with separate language centers

Kim Peek is similar to Paul S in this respect. There is no doubt that he must
have had a fully developed language-center in both hemispheres. Language is
processed in areas of the temporal lobe on the left side of the head. When
you read with your left eye, the information first ends up in the right
hemisphere and must be transferred to the left hemisphere via the corpus
callosum to be processed. This long transfer from one side of the brain to
the other is usually a disadvantage. Since Kim Peek didn't have a corpus
callosum or a hippocampal commissure, his brain would have had to develop the
abilities to process language in both hemispheres. This, of course, gave him
a major advantage in terms of speed-reading and information retention.

You might think the same would apply to other hemisphere-specific abilities,
such as visual imagery and math, which are primarily left-hemisphere
based. However, Kim Peek was unable to "reason his way through" mathematical
problems. Despite his brilliant mind, his IQ was 87, significantly below
normal. It was also difficult for him to follow directions of certain kinds.

There are several respects in which Kim Peek was not like Gazzaniga and
Sperry's split-brain patients. He did not exhibit any symptoms of truly split
personality or conflicting desires deriving from separate hemispheres. How
did he avoid this split in information integration when information could not
cross over the three main connections between the hemispheres?

We know that the brain can also transfer information indirectly through
subcortical areas. Normally, it is a relatively small amount of information
that is transferred that way. But Kim Peek may have developed additional
subcortical connections for information transfer.

[e.g. most marsupials (e.g. the kangaroo) do not have a alternate mechanisms
for communicating between the brain hemispheres.]

In Kim Peek it seems that information that didn't need to travel simply
stayed put in the respective hemisphere. However, he was able to give a full
account of any book he read -- he didn't give two accounts pertaining of odd
/ even pages - so subcortical connections must have been in charge of
hemispheric information transfer.

Peek's ability to retain large amounts of information may have had something
to do with another condition he was afflicted with called macrocephaly. This
brain abnormality consists in an excessively large head and a correspondingly
huge brain. Kim's head was so heavy that it took several years before he
could hold it up on his own.

As a baby the real rain man was diagnosed with mental retardation and the
physicians told his parents that he never would be able to read or talk. They
recommended sending their little boy to a mental institution and geting on
with their lives. Despite the recommendation, Kim’s parents chose to raise
him at home. They quickly realized that their little boy with the oversized
head had a remarkable brain


----- 

Las Vegas

The practice of card counting is well-known in blackjack and consists of the
player mentally tracking the sequence of played cards in an attempt to gain a
small advantage over the dealer, increasing a bet when the count is good (for
example, when the remaining decks contain many face cards) and decreasing
when it is bad. 

In its simplest form, card counting involves assigning a positive or
negative value to each card; low-value cards, such as 2 and 3, are given a
positive value, while tens are given a negative value. The counter then
mentally keeps a running tally of the point values as each card is dealt
and makes regular adjustments to the overall count, taking into account
the approximate number of cards still left to be dealt. p.213

Card counting is not easy and even highly skilled practitioners only gain
around 1% by using this method. Casinos will often ban those they suspect of
card counting from their tables. Our table used an eight-deck shoe, meaning
that there were 416 cards in play, a number large enough to minimise any
possible counting advantage.

Casinos are noisy and distracting environments in which to play and one of
the biggest challenges for me was trying to concentrate. As I sat on my stool
opposite the dealer I focused on the decks of cards, watching intently as
they were individually opened, shuffled and stacked ahead of the start of the
game. The cameras around me attracted onlookers and I quickly had a crowd
encircle me as I played.

[the game was organized as part of a documentary: The Boy With The Incredible Brain 


(las vegas: 29:00-32:00;    icelandic: 42:00...
kim peek meeting: 25:00
vs ramachandran lab UCSD  32:00  Shai Azoulei...)

Blackjack

I was to play for a pre-set period of time. The casino had specially reserved
the table so that I was the only player. It was the dealer versus me. Wanting
to develop a feel for the game, I started by making simple judgements based
on the cards displayed in each hand: I would ‘stand’ if dealt a 10 and 8 and
‘hit’ if given a 3 and 9 (except where the dealer showed a 4, 5 or 6, in
which case I stood), a technique known as ‘basic strategy’.

Even when the player uses basic strategy optimally, the dealer still has a
statistical advantage. Over time my stack of chips became increasingly
depleted. My feel for how the cards were playing, however, was a lot better
than at the start; I was making my decisions more quickly and feeling more
comfortable at the table. 

I made a snap decision to play instinctively, going on how I was
experiencing the flow of numbers in my head as a rolling visual landscape
with peaks and troughs. When my mental numerical landscape peaked, I would
bet more aggressively than when it ebbed.

A change occurred; I began to win more and more individual hands. I relaxed
and began to enjoy the game much more than I had been. At a key point I was
dealt a pair of 7s with the dealer showing a 10. Basic strategy says to
hit. Instead I went with my instinct and split the pair, doubling my original
bet. The dealer drew a third card, which was also a 7. I asked if I could
split this 7. The dealer was surprised – this is extremely unusual play
against a dealer’s 10. The card was split and I now had three hands of 7, my
original bet trebled, against a 10. 

The audience of onlookers behind me were audibly tutting. One man loudly
remarked: ‘What’s he doing splitting 7s against a 10?’ The dealer proceeded
to deal out further cards on each of the three 7s – the first totalled
twenty-one. Then more cards for the second-hand: another
twenty-one. Finally came the third of the 7s, and once again a winning
total of twenty-one. Three consecutive twenty-ones in a single hand against
the dealer. In one fell blow I had made up my losses and beaten the house.

I was still glad to leave Las Vegas. It was too hot, too crowded, with too
many flashing lights...

A genius explains : Guardian Interview by Richard Johnson

Richard Johnson
The Guardian, Saturday 12 February 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2005/feb/12/weekend7.weekend2
(excerpts from a very long article)

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. He can perform mind-boggling
mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds. But unlike other savants, who
can perform similar feats, Tammet can describe how he does it. He speaks
seven languages and is even devising his own language. Now scientists are
asking whether his exceptional abilities are the key to unlock the secrets of
autism.

Daniel Tammet is talking. As he talks, he studies my shirt and counts the
stitches. Ever since the age of three, when he suffered an epileptic fit,
Tammet has been obsessed with counting. Now he is 26, and a mathematical
genius who can figure out cube roots quicker than a calculator and recall pi
to 22,514 decimal places. He also happens to be autistic, which is why he
can't drive a car, wire a plug, or tell right from left. He lives with
extraordinary ability and disability.

Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn't
"calculating": there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives
at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see
numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a
motion, and five is a clap of thunder. "When I multiply numbers together, I
see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape
emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without
having to think." [...]

European record for digits of π

Last year Tammet broke the European record for recalling pi, the mathematical
constant, to the furthest decimal point. He found it easy, he says, because
he didn't even have to "think". To him, pi isn't an abstract set of digits;
it's a visual story, a film projected in front of his eyes. He learnt the
number forwards and backwards and, last year, spent five hours recalling it
in front of an adjudicator. He wanted to prove a point. "I memorised pi to
22,514 decimal places, and I am technically disabled. I just wanted to show
people that disability needn't get in the way."

Tammet has never been able to work 9 to 5. It would be too difficult to fit
around his daily routine. For instance, he has to drink his cups of tea at
exactly the same time every day. Things have to happen in the same order: he
always brushes his teeth before he has his shower. "I have tried to be more
flexible, but I always end up feeling more uncomfortable. Retaining a sense
of control is really important. I like to do things in my own time, and in my
own style, so an office with targets and bureaucracy just wouldn't work."

Instead, he has set up a business on his own, at home, writing email courses
in language learning, numeracy and literacy for private clients. It has had
the fringe benefit of keeping human interaction to a minimum. It also gives
him time to work on the verb structures of Mänti.

Meeting Kim Peek

Few people on the streets have recognised Tammet since his pi record
attempt. But, when a documentary about his life is broadcast on Channel 5
later this year, all that will change. "The highlight of filming was to meet
Kim Peek, the real-life character who inspired the film Rain Man. Before I
watched Rain Man, I was frightened. As a nine-year-old schoolboy, you don't
want people to point at the screen and say, 'That's you.' But I watched it,
and felt a real connection. Getting to meet the real-life Rain Man was
inspirational."

Peek was shy and introspective, but he sat and held Tammet's hand for
hours. "We shared so much - our love of key dates from history, for
instance. And our love of books. As a child, I regularly took over a room in
the house and started my own lending library. I would separate out fiction
and non-fiction, and then alphabetise them all. I even introduced a ticketing
system. I love books so much. I've read more books than anyone else I
know. So I was delighted when Kim wanted to meet in a library." Peek can read
two pages simultaneously, one with each eye. He can also recall, in exact
detail, the 7,600 books he has read. When he is at home in Utah, he spends
afternoons at the Salt Lake City public library, memorising phone books and
address directories."He is such a lovely man," says Tammet. "Kim says, 'You
don't have to be handicapped to be different - everybody's different'. And
he's right."

Life

He was born on January 31 1979. He smiles as he points out that 31, 19, 79
and 1979 are all prime numbers - it's a kind of sign. He was actually born
with another surname, which he prefers to keep private, but decided to change
it by deed poll. It didn't fit with the way he saw himself. "I first saw
'Tammet' online. It means oak tree in Estonian, and I liked that
association. Besides, I've always had a love of Estonian. Such a vowel rich
language."

As a baby, he banged his head against the wall and cried constantly. Nobody
knew what was wrong. His mother was anxious, and would swing him to sleep in
a blanket. She breastfed him for two years. The only thing the doctors could
say was that perhaps he was understimulated. Then, one afternoon when he was
playing with his brother in the living room, he had an epileptic fit.

"I was given medication - round blue tablets - to control my seizures, and
told not to go out in direct sunlight. I had to visit the hospital every
month for regular blood tests. I hated those tests, but I knew they were
necessary. To make up for it, my father would always buy me a cup of squash
to drink while we sat in the waiting room. It was a worrying time because my
Dad's father had epilepsy, and actually died of it, in the end. They were
thinking, 'This is the end of Daniel's life'."

Tammet's mother was a secretarial assistant, and his father a steelplate
worker. "They both left school without qualifications, but they made us feel
special - all nine of us. As the oldest of nine, I suppose it's fair to say
I've always felt special." Even if his younger brothers and sisters could
throw and catch better than him, swim better, kick a ball better, Daniel was
always the oldest. "They loved me because I was their big brother and I could
read them stories."

Counting as a child

He remembers being given a Ladybird book called Counting when he was
four. "When I looked at the numbers I 'saw' images. It felt like a place I
could go where I really belonged. That was great. I went to this other
country whenever I could. I would sit on the floor in my bedroom and just
count. I didn't notice that time was passing. It was only when my Mum shouted
up for dinner, or someone knocked at my door, that I would snap out of it."

One day his brother asked him a sum. "He asked me to multiply something in my
head - like 'What is 82 x 82 x 82 x 82?' I just looked at the floor and
closed my eyes. My back went very straight and I made my hands into
fists. But after five or 10 seconds, the answer just flowed out of my
mouth. He asked me several others, and I got every one right. My parents
didn't seem surprised. And they never put pressure on me to perform for the
neighbours. They knew I was different, but wanted me to have a normal life as
far as possible."

When he isn't working, Tammet likes to hang out with his friends on the
church quiz team. His knowledge of popular culture lets him down, but he's a
shoo-in when it comes to the maths questions. "I do love numbers," he
says. "It isn't only an intellectual or aloof thing that I do. I really feel
that there is an emotional attachment, a caring for numbers. I think this is
a human thing - in the same way that a poet humanises a river or a tree
through metaphor, my world gives me a sense of numbers as personal. It sounds
silly, but numbers are my friends."

Challenges to Tammet's claims

		from  Don't be too impressed by that testing of Tammet
		by Lili Marlene, July 2012

One by one many of the apparently amazing feats of Daniel Tammet have been
exposed by various different individuals as false or suspect or
exaggerated. One type of scientific study of Tammet that has been held up as
proof that Tammet is a genuine synaesthete is the study of memory for items
that are coloured in colours that are inconsistent with the synaesthete's
experienced colours for those items. A genuine synaesthete is supposed to
show a relative or an absolute difficulty in memorizing items displayed in
colours or displayed with some other type of sensory characteristic that
clashes with their synaesthesia.  [Stroop test]

the 2005 paper by Azoulai, Hubbard and Ramachandran is highly suspect...

Tammet’s performance when tested by Azoulai, Hubbard and Ramachandran was
distinguished from a performance typical of a (presumably) non-synaesthete
control group by Tammet’s poorer performance. If Tammet had known or been
able to guess that a deterioration in performance was required when presented
with items that conflicted with his reported synaesthesia, it would have been
the easiest thing in the world to simply not put in an effort during that
particular phase of the testing. Any test that is based on deterioration in
performance can be faked, and this is why the “gold standard” of testing for
synesthesia, The Synesthesia Battery, requires superior performance as
evidence of genuine synaesthesia.

	[Unfortunately this is the only argument in the blog, and it is not a
	very strong one. Of course it is possible to fake on tests that
	involve deterioration - but surely this test was only one of many
	tests.  The paper presents much evidence of other things that Tammet
	is doing that are superior, and this test is merely a further
	corroboration...  to me, the blog is full of inane remarks and seems
	more like a rant...

	Having said that though, even I find his feat of "learning Icelandic in a
	week" rather hard to evaluate or compare; given a good one-to-one
	tutor, aren't there other talented people who may be able to do
	this? ]


Azoulai, Shai, Hubbard, Ed, & Ramachandran, V. S. (2005)  
Does synesthesia contribute to mathematical savant skills? Proc. Cognitive Neuroscience Society. 12, 69 2005 
(Daniel Tammet is the "Arithmos" tested in this study)