Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

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Simon and Schuster, Jan 9, 2007 - Biography & Autobiography - 240 pages
A journey into one of the most fascinating minds alive today—guided by the owner himself.

Bestselling author Daniel Tammet (Thinking in Numbers) is virtually unique among people who have severe autistic disorders in that he is capable of living a fully independent life and able to explain what is happening inside his head.

He sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures, and he can perform extraordinary calculations in his head. He can learn to speak new languages fluently, from scratch, in a week. In 2004, he memorized and recited more than 22,000 digits of pi, setting a record. He has savant syndrome, an extremely rare condition that gives him the most unimaginable mental powers, much like those portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man.

Fascinating and inspiring, Born on a Blue Day explores what it’s like to be special and gives us an insight into what makes us all human—our minds.
 

Contents

Blue Nines and Red Words
1
Early Years
13
Struck by Lightning Epilepsy
29
School Days
47
Odd One
73
7 8 9 Adolescence
91
Ticket to Kaunas
113
Falling in Love
139
The Gift of Tongues
159
A Very Large Slice of
173
Meeting Kim Peek
187
Reykjavík New York Home 13 29 47 73 91 113 139 159 173 187 205
205
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Page vii - First and foremost, we would like to thank the following people, without whom this book would not have been possible: Our families and loved ones. Jason would like to thank his mother, Nancy Santamaría, our most impatient "in-house...
Page 3 - ... six figures in six seconds. When he was asked how many grains of corn there would be in any one of 64 boxes, with 1 in the first, 2 in the second, 4 in the third, 8 in the fourth, and so on, he gave the answers for the fourteenth (8,192), for the eighteenth (131,072), and the twenty-fourth (8,388,608) instantaneously, and he gave the figures for the forty-eighth box (140,737,488,355,328) in six seconds. He also gave the total in all the...

About the author (2007)

Daniel Tammet is a writer, linguist, and educator. A 2007 poll of 4,000 Britons named him as one of the world's "100 living geniuses." His last book, the New York Times bestseller Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, has been translated into 18 languages. He lives in Avignon, France.

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