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I'm a savant,

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or more precisely,

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a high-functioning

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autistic savant.

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It's a rare condition.

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And rarer still when accompanied,

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as in my case,

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by self-awareness

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and a mastery of language.

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Very often when I meet someone

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and they learn this about me,

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there's a certain kind of awkwardness.

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I can see it in their eyes.

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They want to ask me something.

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And in the end, quite often,

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the urge is stronger than they are

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and they blurt it out:

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"If I give you my date of birth,

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can you tell me what day of the week I was born on?"

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(Laughter)

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Or they mention cube roots

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or ask me to recite a long number or long text.

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I hope you'll forgive me

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if I don't perform

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a kind of one-man savant show for you today.

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I'm going to talk instead

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about something

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far more interesting

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than dates of birth or cube roots --

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a little deeper

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and a lot closer, to my mind, than work.

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I want to talk to you briefly

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about perception.

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When he was writing the plays and the short stories

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that would make his name,

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Anton Chekhov kept a notebook

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in which he noted down

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his observations

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of the world around him --

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little details

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that other people seem to miss.

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Every time I read Chekhov

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and his unique vision of human life,

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I'm reminded of why I too

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became a writer.

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In my books,

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I explore the nature of perception

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and how different kinds of perceiving

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create different kinds of knowing

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and understanding.

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Here are three questions

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drawn from my work.

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Rather than try to figure them out,

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I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment

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the intuitions

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and the gut instincts

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that are going through your head and your heart

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as you look at them.

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For example, the calculation:

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can you feel where on the number line

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the solution is likely to fall?

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Or look at the foreign word and the sounds:

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can you get a sense of the range of meanings

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that it's pointing you towards?

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And in terms of the line of poetry,

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why does the poet use the word hare

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rather than rabbit?

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I'm asking you to do this

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because I believe our personal perceptions, you see,

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are at the heart

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of how we acquire knowledge.

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Aesthetic judgments,

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rather than abstract reasoning,

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guide and shape the process

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by which we all come to know

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what we know.

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I'm an extreme example of this.

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My worlds of words and numbers

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blur with color, emotion

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and personality.

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As Juan said,

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it's the condition that scientists call synesthesia,

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an unusual cross-talk

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between the senses.

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Here are the numbers one to 12

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as I see them --

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every number with its own shape and character.

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One is a flash of white light.

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Six is a tiny and very sad black hole.

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The sketches are in black and white here,

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but in my mind they have colors.

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Three is green.

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Four is blue.

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Five is yellow.

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I paint as well.

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And here is one of my paintings.

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It's a multiplication of two prime numbers.

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Three-dimensional shapes

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and the space they create in the middle

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creates a new shape,

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the answer to the sum.

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What about bigger numbers?

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Well you can't get much bigger than Pi,

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the mathematical constant.

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It's an infinite number --

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literally goes on forever.

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In this painting that I made

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of the first 20 decimals of Pi,

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I take the colors

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and the emotions and the textures

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and I pull them all together

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into a kind of rolling numerical landscape.

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But it's not only numbers that I see in colors.

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Words too, for me,

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have colors and emotions

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and textures.

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And this is an opening phrase

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from the novel "Lolita."

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And Nabokov was himself synesthetic.

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And you can see here

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how my perception of the sound L

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helps the alliteration

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to jump right out.

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Another example:

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a little bit more mathematical.

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And I wonder if some of you will notice

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the construction of the sentence

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from "The Great Gatsby."

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There is a procession of syllables --

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wheat, one;

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prairies, two;

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lost Swede towns, three --

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one, two, three.

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And this effect is very pleasant on the mind,

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and it helps the sentence

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to feel right.

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Let's go back to the questions

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I posed you a moment ago.

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64 multiplied by 75.

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If some of you play chess,

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you'll know that 64

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is a square number,

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and that's why chessboards,

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eight by eight,

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have 64 squares.

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So that gives us a form

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that we can picture, that we can perceive.

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What about 75?

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Well if 100,

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if we think of 100 as being like a square,

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75 would look like this.

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So what we need to do now

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is put those two pictures

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together in our mind --

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something like this.

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64 becomes 6,400.

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And in the right-hand corner,

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you don't have to calculate anything.

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Four across, four up and down --

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it's 16.

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So what the sum is actually asking you to do

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is 16,

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16, 16.

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That's a lot easier

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than the way that the school taught you to do math, I'm sure.

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It's 16, 16, 16, 48,

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4,800 --

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4,800,

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the answer to the sum.

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Easy when you know how.

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(Laughter)

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The second question was an Icelandic word.

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I'm assuming there are not many people here

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who speak Icelandic.

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So let me narrow the choices down to two.

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Hnugginn:

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is it a happy word,

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or a sad word?

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What do you say?

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Okay.

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Some people say it's happy.

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Most people, a majority of people,

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say sad.

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And it actually means sad.

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(Laughter)

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Why do, statistically,

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a majority of people

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say that a word is sad, in this case,

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heavy in other cases?

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In my theory, language evolves in such a way

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that sounds match,

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correspond with, the subjective,

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with the personal,

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intuitive experience

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of the listener.

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Let's have a look at the third question.

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It's a line from a poem by John Keats.

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Words, like numbers,

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express fundamental relationships

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between objects

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and events and forces

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that constitute our world.

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It stands to reason that we, existing in this world,

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should in the course of our lives

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absorb intuitively those relationships.

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And poets, like other artists,

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play with those intuitive understandings.

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In the case of hare,

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it's an ambiguous sound in English.

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It can also mean the fibers that grow from a head.

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And if we think of that --

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let me put the picture up --

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the fibers represent vulnerability.

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They yield to the slightest movement

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or motion or emotion.

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So what you have is an atmosphere

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of vulnerability and tension.

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The hare itself, the animal --

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not a cat, not a dog, a hare --

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why a hare?

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Because think of the picture --

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not the word, the picture.

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The overlong ears,

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the overlarge feet,

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helps us to picture, to feel intuitively,

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what it means to limp

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and to tremble.

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So in these few minutes,

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I hope I've been able to share

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a little bit of my vision of things

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and to show you

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that words can have colors and emotions,

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numbers, shapes and personalities.

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The world is richer,

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vaster

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than it too often seems to be.

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I hope that I've given you the desire

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to learn to see the world with new eyes.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)