TED2011
Daniel Tammet: Different ways of knowing
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Daniel Tammet has linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia -- meaning that his perception of words, numbers and colors are woven together into a new way of perceiving and understanding the world. The author of "Born on a Blue Day," Tammet shares his art and his passion for languages in this glimpse into his beautiful mind.
Daniel Tammet - Linguist, educator
Daniel Tammet is the author of "Born on a Blue Day," about his life with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome. He runs the language-learning site Optimnem, and his new book is "Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind." Full bio
Daniel Tammet is the author of "Born on a Blue Day," about his life with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome. He runs the language-learning site Optimnem, and his new book is "Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind." Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
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I'm a savant,
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or more precisely,
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a high-functioning
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autistic savant.
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It's a rare condition.
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And rarer still when accompanied,
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as in my case,
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by self-awareness
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and a mastery of language.
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Very often when I meet someone
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and they learn this about me,
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there's a certain kind of awkwardness.
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I can see it in their eyes.
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They want to ask me something.
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And in the end, quite often,
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the urge is stronger than they are
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and they blurt it out:
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"If I give you my date of birth,
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can you tell me what day of the week I was born on?"
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(Laughter)
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Or they mention cube roots
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or ask me to recite a long number or long text.
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I hope you'll forgive me
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if I don't perform
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a kind of one-man savant show for you today.
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I'm going to talk instead
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about something
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far more interesting
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than dates of birth or cube roots --
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a little deeper
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and a lot closer, to my mind, than work.
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I want to talk to you briefly
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about perception.
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When he was writing the plays and the short stories
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that would make his name,
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Anton Chekhov kept a notebook
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in which he noted down
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his observations
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of the world around him --
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little details
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that other people seem to miss.
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Every time I read Chekhov
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and his unique vision of human life,
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I'm reminded of why I too
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became a writer.
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In my books,
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I explore the nature of perception
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and how different kinds of perceiving
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create different kinds of knowing
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and understanding.
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Here are three questions
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drawn from my work.
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Rather than try to figure them out,
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I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment
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the intuitions
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and the gut instincts
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that are going through your head and your heart
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as you look at them.
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For example, the calculation:
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can you feel where on the number line
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the solution is likely to fall?
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Or look at the foreign word and the sounds:
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can you get a sense of the range of meanings
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that it's pointing you towards?
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And in terms of the line of poetry,
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why does the poet use the word hare
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rather than rabbit?
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I'm asking you to do this
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because I believe our personal perceptions, you see,
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are at the heart
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of how we acquire knowledge.
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Aesthetic judgments,
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rather than abstract reasoning,
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guide and shape the process
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by which we all come to know
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what we know.
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I'm an extreme example of this.
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My worlds of words and numbers
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blur with color, emotion
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and personality.
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As Juan said,
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it's the condition that scientists call synesthesia,
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an unusual cross-talk
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between the senses.
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Here are the numbers one to 12
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as I see them --
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every number with its own shape and character.
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One is a flash of white light.
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Six is a tiny and very sad black hole.
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The sketches are in black and white here,
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but in my mind they have colors.
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Three is green.
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Four is blue.
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Five is yellow.
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I paint as well.
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And here is one of my paintings.
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It's a multiplication of two prime numbers.
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Three-dimensional shapes
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and the space they create in the middle
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creates a new shape,
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the answer to the sum.
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What about bigger numbers?
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Well you can't get much bigger than Pi,
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the mathematical constant.
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It's an infinite number --
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literally goes on forever.
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In this painting that I made
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of the first 20 decimals of Pi,
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I take the colors
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and the emotions and the textures
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and I pull them all together
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into a kind of rolling numerical landscape.
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But it's not only numbers that I see in colors.
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Words too, for me,
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have colors and emotions
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and textures.
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And this is an opening phrase
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from the novel "Lolita."
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And Nabokov was himself synesthetic.
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And you can see here
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how my perception of the sound L
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helps the alliteration
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to jump right out.
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Another example:
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a little bit more mathematical.
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And I wonder if some of you will notice
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the construction of the sentence
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from "The Great Gatsby."
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There is a procession of syllables --
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wheat, one;
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prairies, two;
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lost Swede towns, three --
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one, two, three.
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And this effect is very pleasant on the mind,
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and it helps the sentence
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to feel right.
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Let's go back to the questions
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I posed you a moment ago.
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64 multiplied by 75.
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If some of you play chess,
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you'll know that 64
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is a square number,
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and that's why chessboards,
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eight by eight,
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have 64 squares.
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So that gives us a form
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that we can picture, that we can perceive.
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What about 75?
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Well if 100,
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if we think of 100 as being like a square,
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75 would look like this.
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So what we need to do now
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is put those two pictures
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together in our mind --
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something like this.
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64 becomes 6,400.
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And in the right-hand corner,
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you don't have to calculate anything.
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Four across, four up and down --
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it's 16.
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So what the sum is actually asking you to do
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is 16,
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16, 16.
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That's a lot easier
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than the way that the school taught you to do math, I'm sure.
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It's 16, 16, 16, 48,
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4,800 --
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4,800,
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the answer to the sum.
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Easy when you know how.
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(Laughter)
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The second question was an Icelandic word.
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I'm assuming there are not many people here
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who speak Icelandic.
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So let me narrow the choices down to two.
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Hnugginn:
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is it a happy word,
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or a sad word?
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What do you say?
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Okay.
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Some people say it's happy.
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Most people, a majority of people,
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say sad.
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And it actually means sad.
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(Laughter)
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Why do, statistically,
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a majority of people
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say that a word is sad, in this case,
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heavy in other cases?
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In my theory, language evolves in such a way
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that sounds match,
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correspond with, the subjective,
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with the personal,
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intuitive experience
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of the listener.
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Let's have a look at the third question.
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It's a line from a poem by John Keats.
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Words, like numbers,
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express fundamental relationships
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between objects
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and events and forces
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that constitute our world.
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It stands to reason that we, existing in this world,
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should in the course of our lives
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absorb intuitively those relationships.
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And poets, like other artists,
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play with those intuitive understandings.
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In the case of hare,
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it's an ambiguous sound in English.
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It can also mean the fibers that grow from a head.
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And if we think of that --
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let me put the picture up --
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the fibers represent vulnerability.
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They yield to the slightest movement
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or motion or emotion.
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So what you have is an atmosphere
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of vulnerability and tension.
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The hare itself, the animal --
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not a cat, not a dog, a hare --
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why a hare?
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Because think of the picture --
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not the word, the picture.
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The overlong ears,
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the overlarge feet,
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helps us to picture, to feel intuitively,
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what it means to limp
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and to tremble.
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So in these few minutes,
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I hope I've been able to share
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a little bit of my vision of things
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and to show you
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that words can have colors and emotions,
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numbers, shapes and personalities.
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The world is richer,
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vaster
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than it too often seems to be.
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I hope that I've given you the desire
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to learn to see the world with new eyes.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Daniel Tammet - Linguist, educatorDaniel Tammet is the author of "Born on a Blue Day," about his life with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome. He runs the language-learning site Optimnem, and his new book is "Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind."
Why you should listen
Daniel Tammet is a writer, linguist and educator. He is the creator of Optimnem, a website that has provided language learning instruction to thousands around the globe. His 2006 memoir Born on a Blue Day describes his life with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome; his new book, Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind, is a personal and scientific exploration of how the brain works and the differences and similarities between savant and non-savant minds.
Tammet set a European record on March 14, 2004, when he recited the mathematical constant pi (3.141...) to 22,514 decimal places from memory in a time of 5 hours, 9 minutes.
Daniel Tammet | Speaker | TED.com