[music playing]
Morley Safer: Daniel Tammet, an Englishman, a 27-year-old math and memory wizard.
I was born November 8, 1931.
Daniel Tammet: That's a prime number, 1931. And you were born on a Sunday. And this year your birthday will be on a Wednesday, and you'll be 75.
Morley Safer: Precisely.
It's estimated there are only 50 true savants living in the world today. And yet, none are like Daniel. He is articulate, self-sufficient, blessed with all of the spectacular ability of a savant, but with very little of the disability. Take his math skills.
OK, so 31 by 31 by 31 by 31.
Daniel Tammet: Yeah, is 923,521.
Morley Safer: I dare say you're right. Or 17 times 17 times 17 times 17.
Daniel Tammet: 83,521.
Morley Safer: And it's not just calculating. His gift of memory is stunning. Briefly show him a long numerical sequence and he'll recite it right back to you.
Daniel Tammet: 9, 1, 4 1, 9, 3, 4, 2, 1, 7, 1, 8, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 3, 8, 1.
Morley Safer: Of course.
[laughter]
And he can do it backwards to boot.
Daniel Tammet: 1, 8, 3, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 8, 1, 7, 1.
Morley Safer: That feat is just a warm-up for Daniel Tammet. He first made headlines at Oxford when he publicly recited the endless sequence of numbers embodied by the Greek letter pi. Pi, the numbers we use to calculate the dimensions of a circle. It's usually rounded off to 3.14, but its numbers actually go on to infinity.
Daniel studied the sequence of thousand numbers to a page.
Daniel Tammet: I would sit and I would gorge on them. And I would just absorb hundreds and hundreds at a time.
Morley Safer: It took him several weeks to prepare. And then Daniel headed to Oxford where with number crunchers checking every digit—
Daniel Tammet: 18 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6—
Morley Safer: He opened the floodgates of his extraordinary memory.
Daniel Tammet: 8, 3, 0, 4, 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 6, 5, 0, 2, 2, 6, 2, 5, 1, 9, 0, 7, 0, 6, 7, 9, 5, 4, 5, 6, 8, 5, 1.
Morley Safer: And you were able to recite in the proper order, how many?
Man: 22,000.
Morley Safer: 20—
Daniel Tammet: 514. 4, 9, 6, 0, 3, 5, 7.
Morley Safer: It took him over five hours.
Daniel Tammet: 9, 4, 7, 2, 6, 5.
Morley Safer: He did it without a single mistake.
Daniel Tammet: 3, 9, 9, 5, 2, 0, 6, 1, 4 1, 9, 6, 3, 5, 8, 7. Finished. Yeah.
[applause]
Morley Safer: [inaudible] to say a memory feat like this is truly extraordinary. Dr. VS Ramachandran and his team at the California Center for Brain Study test Daniel extensively after his pi achievement.
Once you met him, what did you make of him?
DR. VS RAMACHANDRAN: I was surprised at how articulate and intelligent he was. And was able to interact socially and introspect on his own abilities.
Morley Safer: And while that introspection is extremely rare among savants, Daniel's ability to describe how his mind works could be invaluable to scientists studying the brain. Our least understood organ.
DR. VS RAMACHANDRAN: Even how you and I do 17 minus 9 is a big mystery. You know, how these little wisps of jelly in your brain doing that computation. We don't know that.
Morley Safer: It may seem to defy logic, but Ramachandran believes that a savant's genius could actually result from brain injury.
DR. VS RAMACHANDRAN: One possibility is that many other parts of the brain are functioning abnormally. Or sub-normally. And this allows the patient to allocate all his attentional resources to the one remaining part. And there's a lot of clinical evidence for this. Some patient's have a stroke and suddenly their artistic skills improve.
Morley Safer: That theory fits well with Daniel. At the age of 4, he suffered a massive epileptic seizure. He believes that seizure contributed to his condition. Numbers were no longer simply numbers. He developed a rare crossing of the senses known as synesthesia.
Daniel Tammet: I see numbers in my head as colors, and shapes, and textures. So when I see a long sequence, the sequence forms landscapes in my mind. Every number up to 10,000, I can visualize in this way as its own color. Has itS own shape, has its own texture.
Morley Safer: For example, this is how Daniel says he sees pi. And when he does those instant computations, he's not calculating, but says the answer simply appears to him as a landscape of colorful shapes.
Daniel Tammet: The shapes aren't static. They're full of color. They're full of texture. In a sense, they're full of life.
Morley Safer: Are they beautiful?
Daniel Tammet: Not all of them. Some of them are ugly. 289 is an ugly number. I don't like it very much. Whereas 333, for example, is beautiful to me. It's round, it's—
Morley Safer: Chubby.
[laughter]
Daniel Tammet: It's chubby.
DANIEL'S MOTHER: He was constantly counting things. I think what first attracted him to books was the actual numbers on each page. And he just loved counting.
Morley Safer: Do you think there is a connection between his epilepsy and his talent?
DANIEL'S MOTHER: He was always different from when he was really a few weeks old. I noticed he was different. So I'm not sure that it's entirely that. But I think it might have escalated it.
Morley Safer: That it opened up that part of the brain?
DANIEL'S MOTHER: Yes that's what I believe. Yes.
Morley Safer: Daniel was also diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. A mild form of autism. It made for a painful childhood.
Daniel Tammet: I would flap my hands sometimes when I was excited. Or pull at my fingers and pull at my lips. And, of course, the children saw these things and would repeat them back to me. And tease me about them. And I would put my fingers in my ears and count very quickly in powers of two. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64.
Morley Safer: Numbers were a defense from the real world, yes?
Daniel Tammet: YES Numbers were my friends and they never changed. So they were reliable. I could trust them.
Morley Safer: And yet, Daniel did not retreat fully into that mysterious prison of autism as many savants do. He believes his large family may have actually forced him to adapt.
Daniel Tammet: Because my parents, having nine children, had so much to do, so much to cope with, I realized I had to do for myself.
Morley Safer: He now runs his own online educational business. He and his partner, Neil, try to keep a low profile, despite his growing fame. But the limits of his autism are always there.
Daniel Tammet: I find it difficult to walk in the streets sometimes if there are lots of people around me. If there's lots of noise, I put my fingers in my ears to block it out.
Morley Safer: That anxiety keeps him close to home. He can't drive and rarely goes shopping. And finds the beach a difficult place because of his compulsion to count the grains of sand. And it manifests itself in other ways, like making a very precise measurement of his cereal each morning.
It must be exactly 45 grams of porridge, no more, no less.
Daniel Tammet: Perfect.
Morley Safer: Do you think that Daniel, in a certain way, represents a real pathway to further understanding the brain?
DR. VS RAMACHANDRAN: I think one could say that time and again in science, something that looks like a curiosity initially often leads to a completely new direction of research. Sometimes they provide the golden key. It doesn't always happen. Sometimes it's just mumbo jumbo, but that may well be true with savants.
Morley Safer: Daniel continues to volunteer for scientists who want to understand his amazing brain. But he's reluctant to become what he calls a performing seal. And has refused most offers to cash in on his remarkable skills.
Daniel Tammet: People all the time asking me to choose numbers for the lottery, or to invent a time-machine, or to come up with some great discovery. But my abilities are not those that mean that I can do everything.
Morley Safer: But he has written a book about his experiences entitled Born on a Blue Day.
Customer: That was totally inspiring.
Morley Safer: He also does motivational speeches for parents of autistic children.
Daniel Tammet: Thank you very much.
Morley Safer: Yet one more gift of his remarkable brain.
Customer: Thanks.
Man: Thank you.
Morley Safer: But at the end of the day, genius or not, that brain does work a little differently.
Daniel Tammet: One hour after we leave today and I will not remember what you look like. And I will find it difficult to recognize you if I see you again. I will remember your handkerchief. And I will remember that you have four buttons on your sleeve. And I'll remember the type of tie you're wearing. It's the details that I remember.
Morley Safer: And it's the details that make us all so different. One man may see numbers as a tedious necessity of modern life. Another sees them as the essence of life.
Daniel Tammet: Pi is one of the most beautiful things in all of the world. And if I can share that joy in numbers. If I can share that in some small measure with the world through my writing and through my speaking, then I feel that I will have done something useful.