.... "If the brain was so simple that we could understand it, then we would be so simple that we couldn't." -- Emerson M. Pugh

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Web mindshavings.blogspot.com

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Savantism

The well-traveled British autistic savant Daniel Tammet, whose autobiographical work "Born On a Blue Day" was an international best-seller, and who, unlike most savants, is able to describe to researchers much of what goes on in his mindworkings, has his own website here:

http://www.optimnem.co.uk/about.php

It includes pages for learning French and Spanish (just two of the many languages Daniel knows), and an interesting art portrait of the first 20 digits of pi (3.1415926535897932384) as Daniel perceives them in his own mind (as color-scapes). For anyone not familiar with Daniel's story, one of his unfathomable claims to fame is accurately reciting from memory the first 22,514 decimal places (that's NOT a typo) of pi in a 5 hour time period.

Some more on savantism here.
And savantism video clips from "60 Minutes" here.

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