Daniel Tammet has been dubbed the world’s greatest mental athlete, and you don’t need to be an intellectual genius to understand why.
His brain is a marvel, capable of feats that seem almost superhuman.
In 2004, he was celebrated for setting a European record for memorizing pi – by saying the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, a staggering 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes.
The memorizer, capable of solving the most complex equations in less time than it takes most of us to punch the numbers into a calculator, was hailed as a mathematical genius, but numbers were just the beginning.
In the past few years, Daniel, 44, has written nine books in different genres and next year he will publish his tenth.
English novelist Daniel Tammet (pictured) has written nine books in his career so far
The eldest of nine siblings (pictured), Daniel was a very difficult baby who cried non-stop
His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. His publishers might want to save themselves some money by getting him to do the translation work himself since he speaks 11 of them. One, Icelandic, he learned in a week.
“It leaves a lot of languages that I don’t speak,” he insists, lest anyone think he’s run out of challenges. “With something like Japanese, I don’t even know the alphabet.”
However, do mere mortals feel intimidated, even inferior, in his presence? Halfway through our interview I tell him I expected this, so it’s probably an occupational hazard? He looks horrified, even pained.
‘Oh no! Nobody should ever feel inferior. I felt inferior for so long. I couldn’t do anything the other kids could do. I couldn’t ride a bike. I was ten before I could swim, while my brothers and sisters could swim when they were five or six. On the social side, it was hopeless. Everyone else had friends. I couldn’t find friends.
“I would ask, ‘What am I missing? Why can’t I do that?”. To this day I can’t drive a car. But at some point in my life I stopped feeling inferior. But I never felt superior.
“I’ve just reached a point where I realize everyone is so different and that’s an enrichment.”
Daniel was on BBC Radio 4 last week supporting a call for “super memory collectors” to volunteer for an academic study into why some people are particularly good at retaining information.
Volunteers who pass initial tests will be invited for MRI brain scans so Cambridge University researchers can assess if there are differences in their brain function or structure.
Daniel was diagnosed with autism at the age of 25 and suffers from a rare related condition called Savant Syndrome, in which people with developmental disabilities have an amazing ability
The most famous scholar is a fictional one – the character Raymond Babbitt as portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 film Rain Man (in the film Dustin Hoffman is pictured alongside his co-star Tom Cruise).
You don’t need to be able to remember a string of more than 22,000 digits — or learn a new language in a week — to qualify.
Anyone who thinks they have an excellent memory can take the preliminary online quiz, which involves challenges such as memorizing a phone number or a pattern of chess moves. Those deemed to have passed particularly well may then be called to come to Cambridge.
This is of course elementary for Daniel, although he knows what it’s like to be a guinea pig. His own brain has been scanned extensively, including by the team behind the new study.
He was diagnosed with autism at the age of 25 and suffers from a rare related condition called Savant Syndrome, in which people with developmental disabilities have an amazing ability.
The most famous scholar is fictional – the character Raymond Babbitt as portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 film Rain Man. Babbitt was based on a real person, Kim Peek, whose parents were once advised to have him institutionalized and were told a lobotomy would “cure” his incessant talking, fidgeting, and pacing.
Daniel, whose own parents knew something was wrong when he started banging his head against the wall and running around in circles, met Kim in 2004.
He describes the encounter – the first time he met a kindred spirit who shared his love of books and facts and figures – as “one of the happiest moments of my life”.
Although Daniel was born in Barking, East London into a working class family – his father Kevin was a sheet metal worker; his mother Jennifer, a secretary – his life now takes place in Paris.
He lives with his French husband Jerome Tabet, a 43-year-old photographer and artist whom he met while promoting his 2006 autobiography, in a small but impeccably located apartment near Notre Dame.
“To the teachers, I was the perfect student, but to the other kids, I was just weird,” Daniel said. Pictured: A childhood picture of the essayist, novelist and translator
The writer pictured with husband James Tabet this year
At night he likes to trace the lights of the Eiffel Tower as they cast predictable patterns on the walls. It might seem strange that someone in need of routine, order and familiarity would settle so far from home, but that’s how it always has been. At 18 he went to Lithuania to study.
“I think there was an element of my condition that bizarrely made me fearless,” he says.
He tells me that if you’re never comfortable, even in your own head, then home can be anywhere.
He laughs at what people thought of him in Lithuania, where people he met saw his Brits before his autistic features. “People in Lithuania would say to me: ‘You are so different, but you are British, eccentric’. It gave me a complete change of perspective, the idea that being on the spectrum isn’t just purely cognitive, it’s almost cultural.
For most of us, numbers are just numbers sitting boringly on a page. Not so with Daniel, who has synesthesia – the phenomenon of experiencing one sense through another. “I don’t count numbers as much as I dance with them,” he says, explaining that for him every number has a three-dimensional shape, each with a distinctive color.
When numbers are combined, his brain turns into a whirl of yellow, blue, and green. He not only “sees” these numbers, he feels them. “They are my friends,” he adds. He feels pi the most – the infinite number.
When he describes coming to a crucial point involving a set of nines in his famous pi recital, you can actually feel the excitement bounce off him.
In 2004, Daniel was celebrated for setting a European record for memorizing pi – reciting the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter by a staggering 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes
At school, Daniel, like so many neurodiverse people, was just the weird kid who acted in weird ways. Pictured: Daniel as a child
“It’s a point in pi – after 762 digits – that fascinates mathematicians. The odds of getting 999999 is literally one in a million, but it only comes after 762. When I got there my voice deepened and my whole demeanor changed because nine is a very difficult number for me. It is dark.’
Among those who understood his reaction was singer Kate Bush, who later wrote a song about Pi and Daniel’s relationship with it. Which in itself is overwhelming.
“Yes, but she understood that, which was amazing because it meant I had found my voice. It’s just paradoxical that I had to find it in numbers before I could find it in words.’
This may be a man with an amazing memory – not for him who worries about memorizing all the passwords modern life now demands – who can make equations seemingly without thinking and write beautifully crafted prose (he was born with Hemingway), but he can’t use a cell phone or drive a car.
“Technically, I’m disabled,” he says. “But do I feel handicapped or capable? It’s difficult because there are things I can’t do — things neurotypical people do without thinking.”
Do you like driving? ‘Yes. I took the theory exam twice and got 100 percent each time, but the practical side was difficult. When I see a detail on a license plate, I can get distracted, or when the light hits a certain way, it can distract my attention. At speed, that can be dangerous.”
Just as I marvel at how he can multiply 384 by 6,943 (answer: 2,666,112) in seconds in his head, he marvels at my ability to change a clutch without damaging the car.
“Neurotypical cognition fascinates me,” he says, beaming. “You can make adjustments in a split second without even realizing it, and you don’t even take credit for it.”
The sad thing is that it took him so long to believe in his unusual strengths. At school, Daniel, like so many neurodiverse people, was just the weird kid who acted in weird ways.
“For the teachers, I was the perfect student,” he says. “But to the other kids, I was just weird.” In sports, he was always picked last. He was the friendless one and, no, he wasn’t at all happy to be in his own little world, even if it was a brilliant world.
He is wary of suggestions that neurodiversity might be a “superpower,” because most of the time it isn’t.
“Nevertheless, I want to fit in as well as possible. If someone had asked me as a child, “Do you want to be like everyone else?” I would have said “yes” immediately. I had no awareness that what I had could be anything special. It wasn’t a gift. I just didn’t want to feel left out, bullied for being different.”
Kids like Daniel still fall through the cracks, but he credits his parents, Kevin and Jennifer, with making sure he didn’t. “What they gave me was unconditional love and acceptance,” he says.
The eldest of nine siblings, Daniel was a very difficult baby who cried non-stop. At the age of three he suffered from epileptic seizures (which can be linked to autism). At school he just didn’t know how to communicate, which is extraordinary given his eloquence and emotional nimbleness today. “I didn’t know how to talk to other kids. I didn’t have the language. I remember we were getting our shots and someone was talking – obviously jokingly – about our arms falling off. I took it literally. I was shocked.’
He was an avid reader. The school library was his sanctuary and he believes he taught himself how to communicate by studying their books. It didn’t work right away. “I went and imitated what I had read, not knowing that the books were from the 1940s and 1950s. The other children would say, “Why are you talking funny? What’s wrong with you?”.’
He also had to learn to make eye contact. “The teachers and my parents said, ‘You have to look at me,’ which I just couldn’t understand. Then I would stare too much and they would say, ‘Stop staring’.’
In addition to books about the brain (his own and others), he has written a crime novel in which the main character is neurodiverse and makes connections that solve crimes.
His next book was about meeting others on the spectrum. He tells me about the blind autistic woman he met who can walk into a room and tell how many chairs are in it. That blows him away too. “There’s so much we still don’t understand about how the brain works,” he says. This is exactly why he supports so many scientific studies.
He could have monetized his genius more, although he says he makes a very good living from writing.
After his Pi triumph and a subsequent documentary about his life, a program maker in Los Angeles offered him his own TV show. He declined because he “didn’t want to be a performing seal”.
“It was around the time they poached a lot of Brits like Piers Morgan and Anne Robinson. They offered me a TV series where I would be given time to study in a certain area and then compete against experts.
“It was life changing money and I’m working class so of course I was tempted but ultimately those around me said ‘yes it will change your life but not necessarily in the way you want it to be'”.’
It takes a man who knows his own mind – and all the complexities within it – to make that decision.
n To determine if you are a “super-memorizer” and for more information on the research go to cam.ac.uk/research/news/search-is-on-for-super-memorisers-to-help -scientists-unlock -the-mysteries-of-memory