Born on a Blue Day

Astounded this weekend to see, on the New York gossip blog Gawker, a short piece supposedly satirising the New York Times' exaggerated coverage of autism. The post, titled New York Times Autism Round-up, did indeed lead to four different articles on autism (one from Thursday, but who's counting?) -- enough for most non-specialists from one newspaper.

Among them, a story on Daniel Tammet, an English man who has Asperger's, and who more importantly has been diagnosed Savants Syndrome. I've been planning a blog post on Tammet since seeing the film made about him by the British Five TV company, which I'd seen on Google Video via the excellent smashingtelly site, which gathers full-length TV programmes on a daily basis. The film is called The Boy with the Incredible Brain.

To cut a long story short, Tammet was a difficult infant who wouldn't stop crying. He then suffered multiple seizures, after which he found he now had the ability to "see" numbers in his mind in an infinite variety of shapes and colours. This is a condition neurologists call synaesthesia, though it's written about more evocatively by Jorge Luis Borges in his story Funes the Memorious, in which Funes, following head trauma, cannot forget a single detail of anything he has ever seen, including every configuration of cloud in every sky he has ever looked at.

Those cloud formations are akin to numbers as Daniel Tammet sees them, and he is able to imagine impossibly complex numbers by, to put it terribly roughly, visualising himself withinI the landscape in which they exist.

As a result, he can perform massive calculations in his head in seconds flat, and was able to memorise the constant Pi to an impressive 22,500 places. The film captures that feat, and follows him as he meets autism experts like Simon Baron Cohen, neurologists and fellow autistics, like Kim Peek, said to be the inspiration for Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man.

I'll be posting a review of Rain Man, which I consider to be a pernicious influence on public perception of autism, one of these days. I'll also come back to the Daniel Tammet film, which troubled me in a number of ways and yet deserves more detailed consideration.

One thing I won't have the luxury of coming back to after further cogitation, however, is a reading of Daniel Tammet's autobiography, Born on a Blue Day (which gives this post its title) on BBC Radio 4, which you can listen to on the Internet for one week. The first 15-minute extract went out today, with further extracts daily for the rest of the week. I'm not at all sure they do an omnibus edition, so don't count on it.

I dare say I'll have some comment to make after I've listened to all of it.