Theresa's Book Review
Posted by tom | Mar 6, 2007In the 30 seconds that Eden allowed me to choose a book for myself from the library last week, I picked up Born on a Blue Day: A Memoir by Daniel Tammet. It's a quick read and a fascinating look "inside the extraordinary mind of an autistic savant."
On the autistic spectrum Daniel has Asperger's syndrome, which qualifies him as a "high functioning" autistic person. For those of you familiar with the movie Rainman, Daniel shares many characteristics with the character Raymond played by Dustin Hoffman. He has savant syndrome, an extremely rare condition, that imbues his mind with the extraordinary ability to perform complex mathematical calculations in his head and to learn foreign languages in a matter of days. But unlike Raymond Daniel functions successfully and can explain what is happening inside his head. Eye-opening to me was his description of how he "sees" numbers, a totally foreign concept to most of us. He sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures. In 2004 he set a world record when he recited from memory 22, 514 digits of pi without error in a time of five hours and nine minutes. Following is a passage from the book where Daniel describes what he sees in his mind:
"When I look at a sequence of numbers, my head begins to fill with colors, shapes and textures that knit together spontaneously to form a visual landscape...To recall each digit, I simply retrace the different shapes and textures in my head and read the numbers out of them. For very long numbers, such as pi, I break the digits down into smaller segments. The size of each segment varies, depending on what the digits are. For example, if a number is very bright in my head and the next one is very dark, I would visualize them separately, whereas a smooth number followed by another smooth number would be remembered together. As the sequence of digits grows, my numerical landscapes become more complex and layered, until--as with pi--they become like an entire country in my mind, composed of numbers." (p. 177-178) He goes on to say that when he does calculations in his head, "the process takes a matter of seconds and happens spontaneously. It's like doing math without having to think." (5)
It makes me wonder if there's a way for the rest of us "ordinary minds" to learn to tap into that part of our brains that enables savants to perform these magnificent feats. I assume the ability is latent in our brains, though one theory is that certain brain injuries "release" the ability.
A tangential interest that arose from reading this book is that of pi itself. I'm no mathematician by any stretch of the imagination (I still can't "borrow" in my head), but the few facts that Daniel shared about pi were fascinating. Besides circles and spheres, he mentioned that "pi appears as the average ratio of the actual length and the direct distance between source and mouth of a meandering river." (174) My mind went immediately to our Creator, whom I imagine had tons of fun creating these remarkable things for us to discover. And my related thought was of how this example points to our Creator. Even if random mutations led to life, random mutations were not responsible for the mathematical beauty of pi.
And from there my thoughts turn to Eden and I wonder what remarkable feats her brain is accomplishing every day as it finds new pathways, detouring the ones that are blocked. I can see it happening at times--I watch her face as she attempts a movement with her right hand, the hand she used to totally ignore. It's as if her whole body says, "OK, how are we going to make this happen?" and slowly and shakily the hand obeys the brain. There is so much of which we are ignorant. Thank God for modern medicine and its lifesaving advances. But we have so much to learn. We use our finite brains to try to comprehend our own complexities.
Interesting post! Maybe I'll check out the book, if I ever get through the (currently thick) read-me-next stack already on my shelf.
Posted by Peter V, Mar 6 2007, 12:33