Different ways of knowing

Daniel Tammet has linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia -- meaning that his perception of words, numbers and colors are woven together into a new way of perceiving and understanding the world. The author of "Born on a Blue Day," Tammet shares his art and his passion for languages in this glimpse into his beautiful mind.

I'm a savant,

or more precisely,

a high-functioning

autistic savant.

It's a rare condition.

And rarer still when accompanied,

as in my case,

by self-awareness

and a mastery of language.

Very often when I meet someone

and they learn this about me,

there's a certain kind of awkwardness.

I can see it in their eyes.

They want to ask me something.

And in the end, quite often,

the urge is stronger than they are

and they blurt it out:

"If I give you my date of birth,

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

(Laughter)

Or they mention cube roots

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

I hope you'll forgive me

if I don't perform

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

I'm going to talk instead

about something

far more interesting

than dates of birth or cube roots --

a little deeper

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

I want to talk to you briefly

about perception.

When he was writing the plays and the short stories

that would make his name,

Anton Chekhov kept a notebook

in which he noted down

his observations

of the world around him --

little details

that other people seem to miss.

Every time I read Chekhov

and his unique vision of human life,

I'm reminded of why I too

became a writer.

In my books,

I explore the nature of perception

and how different kinds of perceiving

create different kinds of knowing

and understanding.

Here are three questions

drawn from my work.

Rather than try to figure them out,

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

the intuitions

and the gut instincts

that are going through your head and your heart

as you look at them.

For example, the calculation:

can you feel where on the number line

the solution is likely to fall?

Or look at the foreign word and the sounds:

can you get a sense of the range of meanings

that it's pointing you towards?

And in terms of the line of poetry,

why does the poet use the word hare

rather than rabbit?

I'm asking you to do this

because I believe our personal perceptions, you see,

are at the heart

of how we acquire knowledge.

Aesthetic judgments,

rather than abstract reasoning,

guide and shape the process

by which we all come to know

what we know.

I'm an extreme example of this.

My worlds of words and numbers

blur with color, emotion

and personality.

As Juan said,

it's the condition that scientists call synesthesia,

an unusual cross-talk

between the senses.

Here are the numbers one to 12

as I see them --

every number with its own shape and character.

One is a flash of white light.

Six is a tiny and very sad black hole.

The sketches are in black and white here,

but in my mind they have colors.

Three is green.

Four is blue.

Five is yellow.

I paint as well.

And here is one of my paintings.

It's a multiplication of two prime numbers.

Three-dimensional shapes

and the space they create in the middle

creates a new shape,

the answer to the sum.

What about bigger numbers?

Well you can't get much bigger than Pi,

the mathematical constant.

It's an infinite number --

literally goes on forever.

In this painting that I made

of the first 20 decimals of Pi,

I take the colors

and the emotions and the textures

and I pull them all together

into a kind of rolling numerical landscape.

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

Words too, for me,

have colors and emotions

and textures.

And this is an opening phrase

from the novel "Lolita."

And Nabokov was himself synesthetic.

And you can see here

how my perception of the sound L

helps the alliteration

to jump right out.

Another example:

a little bit more mathematical.

And I wonder if some of you will notice

the construction of the sentence

from "The Great Gatsby."

There is a procession of syllables --

wheat, one;

prairies, two;

lost Swede towns, three --

one, two, three.

And this effect is very pleasant on the mind,

and it helps the sentence

to feel right.

Let's go back to the questions

I posed you a moment ago.

64 multiplied by 75.

If some of you play chess,

you'll know that 64

is a square number,

and that's why chessboards,

eight by eight,

have 64 squares.

So that gives us a form

that we can picture, that we can perceive.

What about 75?

Well if 100,

if we think of 100 as being like a square,

75 would look like this.

So what we need to do now

is put those two pictures

together in our mind --

something like this.

64 becomes 6,400.

And in the right-hand corner,

you don't have to calculate anything.

Four across, four up and down --

it's 16.

So what the sum is actually asking you to do

is 16,

16, 16.

That's a lot easier

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

It's 16, 16, 16, 48,

4,800 --

4,800,

the answer to the sum.

Easy when you know how.

(Laughter)

The second question was an Icelandic word.

I'm assuming there are not many people here

who speak Icelandic.

So let me narrow the choices down to two.

Hnugginn:

is it a happy word,

or a sad word?

What do you say?

Okay.

Some people say it's happy.

Most people, a majority of people,

say sad.

And it actually means sad.

(Laughter)

Why do, statistically,

a majority of people

say that a word is sad, in this case,

heavy in other cases?

In my theory, language evolves in such a way

that sounds match,

correspond with, the subjective,

with the personal,

intuitive experience

of the listener.

Let's have a look at the third question.

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

Words, like numbers,

express fundamental relationships

between objects

and events and forces

that constitute our world.

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

should in the course of our lives

absorb intuitively those relationships.

And poets, like other artists,

play with those intuitive understandings.

In the case of hare,

it's an ambiguous sound in English.

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

And if we think of that --

let me put the picture up --

the fibers represent vulnerability.

They yield to the slightest movement

or motion or emotion.

So what you have is an atmosphere

of vulnerability and tension.

The hare itself, the animal --

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

why a hare?

Because think of the picture --

not the word, the picture.

The overlong ears,

the overlarge feet,

helps us to picture, to feel intuitively,

what it means to limp

and to tremble.

So in these few minutes,

I hope I've been able to share

a little bit of my vision of things

and to show you

that words can have colors and emotions,

numbers, shapes and personalities.

The world is richer,

vaster

than it too often seems to be.

I hope that I've given you the desire

to learn to see the world with new eyes.

Thank you.

(Applause)