In Michigan
Daniel Tammet
Noon Oct. 31
Adrian College
www.optimnem.co.uk
Nine: To most, a number that falls between eight and 10. But to Daniel Tammet, it's how he sees his partner. His lover is tall – in Tammet's mind, a requirement for being a "9."
"As a child, I would sometimes give people a number or imagine them as a number, and it would help me be more comfortable around them," he says from England. "That's really something I did as a child; I don't do it so much now."
That's because after years of feeling inferior to his schoolmates, he changed. The shy Englishman can communicate better than most people – much to the disbelief of those who don't fully understand his mild case of autism: Asperger's syndrome.
Tammet is also a "savant" – an individual with a superhuman mental ability, much like Dustin Hoffman's character in the 1988 movie "Rain Man." To Tammet, numbers are shapes, colors, textures, movements, even emotions – a condition known as synesthesia. David Letterman is the number 117: tall, lanky and wobbly. An "11" is friendly; "5" is loud. But he favors "4" – quiet and shy, a lot like him.
Since age 3, after suffering an epileptic fit, Tammet has been infatuated with counting. To a degree, fellow students saw him as the go-to guy for his brains, but most of them stayed away. He was the odd brainiac out.
Now, at 26, his mathematical-mind works quicker than a calculator – and he can recall pi to 22,514 decimal places. The infinite number enthralls him. The colors, the shapes and the flow: He sees all those elements as more than just a number. "I see the beauty in it, because I can visualize that number as a vast shimmering landscape … and it comes to life for me," he says. "I don't try to put it inside my head, because my head would break."
His story, chronicled in "Born on a Blue Day," has yielded piles and piles of mail from people worldwide. "There is a characteristic to all of them (the letters), which is: They understand themselves better as a result of reading my story because many people – for all sorts of reasons, who aren't autistic at all – feel different in some way and feel apart from their peers (and) apart from the world around them."
The letters are written in multiple languages – ones that most people probably wouldn't understand. Except for Tammet. He knows more than 10 languages, learned Icelandic in just one week and is creating a new language called Maenti, which is strongly influenced by the vowel and image-rich languages of northern Europe.
Intense research on the brain, Tammet says, is furthering understanding of conditions like autism, and the stigma of such conditions is diminishing. There are fewer than 50 autistic savants in the world, according to ABC News. Though Tammet took up Christianity five years ago, he still doesn't credit this phenomenon to a divine power: "I think it would be too simplistic to ascribe it to divine power in the same way that it would be, I think, too simplistic to ascribe it to environment or genetic powers."
The same goes for him being gay, which he's never resented. It was simply a natural part of Tammet's transition into manhood, he says. He just knew he would one day fall in love with a man. End of story. "I have blue eyes; some people have brown eyes. I'm right-handed; some people are left-handed. I didn't see it as an issue at all."
His partner, Neil, is shy – just like Tammet. Together they live a quiet life, spending most of their time at home. They share a mutual interest in The Carpenters' music – Tammet's enthusiasm began after watching 1989's made-for-TV film "The Karen Carpenter Story," and Neil's mother played the group's tunes on repeat when he was a kid. Sure, they're two in the same; but the lovebirds, who met on the Internet, also are quite different.
"We're always learning new things from each other," Tammet says. "I have some awareness for cars and computers and so on, and I wouldn't have otherwise – because those are sort of things he's interested in. Similarly, he has some awareness, I think, for language and numbers."
Though the self-employed Tammet will go on a press tour beginning Oct. 25, Neil couldn't temporarily escape from his job as a software engineer. A friend will join Tammet as he travels America, a place with a rich culture and history that's always fascinated him, he says. And during his explorations, Neil won't be far from Tammet's mind.
"I'm not sure who said it," he says, "but one of the wonderful things about going away is coming back again."
