60 Minutes this week featured ‘Brain Man‘: a savant named Daniel Tammet who has been described as the ‘Rosetta Stone’ to unlocking the secrets of the minds of autistic savants. Unlike most savants, Tammet is able to communicate how his thinking processes work (some of which involve synesthesia, and seeing numbers as shapes and colours). And his ‘mental feats’ are prodigious – reciting pi to more than 20,000 places from memory, and learning to speak another language in one week. The website has video of the complete 60 Minutes segment (13 mins), which is well worth checking out if you didn’t see it on the box. On the back of the 60 Minutes publicity, Tammet’s book Born on a Blue Day has shot to #1 on Amazon US (also available at Amazon UK).
Brain Man
