by Joshua Foer
One test that might help demonstrate Daniel’s synesthesia more conclusively would be an fMRI scan. In many number-color synesthetes, you can actually see brain areas associated with color processing light up when the subject is asked to read a number. When Baron-Cohen teamed up with fMRI experts to look at Daniel’s brain, they didn’t find this. Their test subject “did not activate extra-striate regions normally associated with synaesthesia suggesting that he has an unusual and more abstract and conceptual form of synaesthesia,” the researchers concluded. Were it not for the fact that he’d passed the Test of Genuineness for Synesthesia, another reasonable conclusion might be that Daniel is not a synesthete at all.
“Sometimes people ask me if I mind being a guinea pig for the scientists. I have no problem with it because I know that I am helping them to understand the human brain better, which is something that will benefit everyone,” Daniel writes in his memoir. “It is also gratifying for me to learn more about myself, and the way in which my mind works.” When Anders Ericsson invited Daniel to visit FSU to be tested according to his own exacting standards, Daniel said he was too busy to make the trip.
The problem with all the tests given to Daniel is their null hypothesis—the working assumption that would be true if their alternative hypothesis were proven false: namely, that if Daniel wasn’t a savant, then he must be just a regular guy. But what needs to be tested, especially in light of his unusual personal history, is the alternative possibility that the world’s most famous savant might actually be a trained mnemonist.
About a year after my first meeting with Daniel, his publicist e-mailed me to ask if I wanted to meet with him again, this time over breakfast at the stylish midtown hotel he was staying at in New York. He was in town to do an appearance on Good Morning America and to promote his book, Born on a Blue Day, which had debuted in America in third place on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.
After a cup of coffee and some pleasant chitchat about his life in the spotlight, I asked him again—for the third time—what the number 9,412 looked like to him. There was a flicker of recognition in his eyes before he closed them. He knew I hadn’t pulled those digits out of thin air. He put his fingers in his ears, and held them there for two very long, uncomfortable minutes of silence. “I can see it in my head. But I can’t break it down,” he said, finally.
“Last time I asked, you were able to describe it almost immediately.”
He thought about it a bit longer. “It would be dark blue, and it would be pointy, and shiny, with a drifting motion. Or I could picture it as ninety-four and twelve, in which case it would look like a triangle and this sort of shape.” He made a kind of quadrilateral with his arms. His face was cherry red. “It depends on all sorts of things, like whether I heard the number OK, and how I decided to break it up. It depends on whether I’m tired. I make mistakes sometimes. I see the wrong number. I mistake it for a number that looks similar. That’s why I prefer to do tests with actual scientists. There isn’t the same stress.”
I read back to him the descriptions he’d given me of 9,412 the last two times I’d seen him. They could hardly have been more different. I told him my theory, which I realized would be very difficult to prove: that he was using the same basic techniques as other mental athletes, and that he invented these far-out synesthetic descriptions of numbers to mask the fact that he had memorized a simple image to associate with each of the two-digit combinations from 00 to 99—one of the most basic techniques in the mnemonist’s tool kit. It was one of the most uncomfortable sentences I’d ever spoken to anyone.
For some time, I agonized over whether to include Daniel in this book. But late one night, not long before I was supposed to turn in a draft of this chapter, I decided to do one last Internet search for his name—just to see if I might have missed something, or at least to refresh my memory about a story that had been sitting in a folder in my filing cabinet for over a year. Somehow—and I don’t know how I missed this before—I found a cached version of danieltammet.com, a Web site created in 2000 that hadn’t been online for at least three or four years. The seven-year-old “About” page describing Daniel included a surprisingly forthright bit of autobiography that didn’t make it into Born on a Blue Day:
My own interest in memory and conversely memory sport was sparked by my casual acquaintance with a children’s book on broad memory concepts for better exam performance at the age of 15. The following year I passed my GCSEs with some of the year’s best results and subsequently performed well at A-level, mastering French and German along the way with the help of these tried-and-tested techniques ... My obsession with the sport grew, and following months of strenuous training and hard work I climbed into the World’s Top-5 rated Memory sportsmen.
Earlier, I had also found something else, a series of messages posted several years ago from the same e-mail address used by Daniel Corney, but sent by someone named Daniel Andersson, who claimed to be “a well-respected and gifted psychic with more than 20 years of experience helping and empowering others.” The messages explained that Daniel Andersson had received his psychic powers during a series of childhood seizures. There was a link to a Web site where you could arrange a phone reading with Daniel for “advice on all manner of topics, including relationship problems, health and financial matters, lost love and contacting those who have passed over.”
I asked Daniel what I was supposed to make of those e-mails. Six years ago he was claiming that his epileptic seizures gave him psychic powers. Now he was claiming that they’d made him a savant. “Do you see why someone might be suspicious?” I asked.
He paused to collect himself. “God this is embarrassing,” he said. “After I offered myself as a tutor and that wasn’t successful, I read an ad for someone who could do psychic readings. You could work from home and use the telephone. That was ideal for me. I wasn’t a psychic. I did it for about a year because I had no income otherwise. I was regularly told off, because I wasn’t giving advice. I was mostly just listening. I treated it, start to finish, only as an opportunity to listen to people. With hindsight, I wish I hadn’t done that work. But I was desperate. Look, life is complex. I never thought I would come into the public eye. I promise you that I’ve done tests for consistency with scientists who are well placed to determine whether I’m putting it on, and they’re opinion—not just one scientist’s opinion, crucially—is that I’m for real.”
Toward the end of our final meeting, I told Daniel all the reasons I couldn’t bring myself to believe that he, the world’s most famous savant, was truly a savant. “I want to be convinced,” I told him, “but I’m not.”
“If I wanted to trick you, if I wanted to pull the wool over your eyes, I would practice immensely,” he said frankly. “I would come out all guns blazing. I would jump through every hoop. But I sincerely don’t care what you think about me. I don’t mean that in a personal way. I mean that I don’t care what anybody thinks about me. I know myself. I know what goes on in my head when I close my eyes. I know what numbers mean to me. These things are hard to explain, and hard to put into terms you can easily analyze. If I was some very good person at defending something, then I would think very carefully and make some great impression on you and everyone else.”
“You have made a great impression on everyone else.”
“People trust scientists and scientists have studied me—and I trust scientists. They’re neutral. They’re not media. They’re not interested in writing a particular angle. They’re interested in truth. With media, I am just who I am. Sometimes I’ll come across very well, other times I will be more nervous, and I won’t make such a good impression. I’m human. I’m inconsistent because I’m human. Of all the people who’ve interviewed me, you have treated me the most like a normal person. You’ve not idolized me. You’ve treated me on your level. I respect that. I feel more comfortable being a human than being an angel.”
“That may be because I suspect you are just a normal person,” I s
aid. As those words came out of my mouth, I realized I didn’t really mean them. What frustrated me about Daniel was that I knew he wasn’t normal. In fact, the one thing I know I can say for certain about him is that he is exceptionally bright. I know how much work it takes to train one’s memory. Anyone can do it, but not just anyone can do it to the degree that I suspected Daniel had. I believed Daniel was special. I just wasn’t sure he was special in the way he was claiming.
I asked Daniel if, when he looked at himself in the mirror honestly, he really considered himself a savant.
“Am I a savant?” He put down his coffee and leaned in close. “It all depends on how you define the word, doesn’t it? You could define ‘savant’ in such a way that I would be excluded from the definition. You could define it such a way that Kim Peek would be excluded from the definition. And you could define it in such a way that there would be no more savants in the world at all.”
It all comes down to definitions. In his book Extraordinary People, Treffert defines savant syndrome as “an exceedingly rare condition in which persons with serious mental handicaps ... have spectacular islands of ability or brilliance which stand in stark, markedly incongruous contrast to the handicap.” According to that definition, the question of whether Daniel uses memory techniques would be irrelevant to whether he is a savant. All that matters is that he has a history of a developmental disability and can perform phenomenal mental feats. According to Treffert’s definition, Daniel would indeed be a prodigious savant, albeit one whose disability is less pronounced. However, what Treffert’s definition does not capture is the clear difference between someone like Kim Peek, whose incredible abilities are apparently unconscious and perhaps even automatic, and someone who achieves those same skills through tedious, methodical training.
As late as the nineteenth century, the term “savant” had an entirely different connotation than it has today. It was the highest epithet that could be bestowed on a man of learning. A savant was someone who had mastered multiple fields, who traded in abstract ideas, who “consecrate[d] their energies to the search for truth,” as Charles Richet, the author of the 1927 book The Natural History of a Savant, put it. The term had nothing to do with singular abilities or a prodigious memory. And yet over the last century the word’s meaning has changed. In 1887, John Langdon Down, better known for the chromosomal disorder that bears his name, coined the term “idiot savant.” The word “idiot,” regarded as politically incorrect, eventually fell away. In a world in which our everyday memories have atrophied and we’ve become totally estranged from the idea of a disciplined memory, “savant” has gone from being a term of art and an emblem of intellectual accomplishment to being a freakish condition, a syndrome. You’d never hear a polymath like Oliver Sacks described as a savant today, though he, as much as anyone, meets the dictionary definition. Today, the word is reserved for people like the autistic twins that Sacks famously wrote about, who were supposedly able to count 111 matches the instant they spilled onto the floor.
So what about someone like Daniel? One of the oldest myths about savants is that they were destined to be born into this world as geniuses, but by some terrible twist of fate had all of their aptitudes curtailed but one. I wonder about Daniel. I wonder what we would say about him if he was just a guy who had trained himself to memorize 22,000 digits of pi and to multiply three-digit numbers in his head. I wonder what we’d say if he’d achieved those things only through rigorous discipline and enormous effort. Would that make him more incredible than Kim Peek, or less? We want to believe that there are Daniel Tammets walking among us, individuals born into this world with extraordinary talents in the face of extraordinary difficulties. It is one of the most inspiring ideas about the human mind. But perhaps Daniel exemplifies an even more inspiring idea: that we all have remarkable capacities asleep inside of us. If only we bothered ourselves to awaken them.
ELEVEN
THE U.S. MEMORY CHAMPIONSHIP
There was to be a new event at the 2006 U.S. Memory Championship, one never before experienced in the history of memory competitions. It was clunkily called “Three Strikes and You’re Out of the Tea Party,” and it had been dreamed up specifically to please the producers from HDNet, the cable network that would, for the first time ever, be airing the contest on national television. Five strangers, posing as guests at a tea party, would walk onto the stage and tell the competitors ten pieces of information about themselves—their addresses, phone numbers, hobbies, birthdays, favorite foods, pets’ names, the make and model of their cars, etc. It was a test as true to the demands of real life as there had ever been in a memory contest. I had no idea how I would prepare for it, and frankly I hadn’t thought much about it until just a month and a half before the contest, when Ed and I spent a pair of evenings on a transatlantic telephone call inventing a system that would allow me to quickly and easily file away all of that personal information in a specially designed memory palace set aside for each of the strangers.
I had constructed five imaginary buildings, one for each of the “tea party” guests. Each was built in a different style, but with a similar floor plan based around a central atrium and satellite rooms. The first palace was a modernist glass cube in the manner of Philip Johnson’s Glass House; the second was a turreted Queen Anne of the type you see all over San Francisco, with lots of frilly scrollwork and ostentatious ornamentation; the third was Frank Gehry-esque, with wavy titanium walls and warped windows; the fourth was based on Thomas Jefferson’s redbrick home, Monticello; and there was nothing special about the fifth except that all the walls were painted bright blue. Each home’s kitchen would serve as the repository of an address. Each home’s den would hold a phone number. The master bedroom was for hobbies, the bathroom was for birthdays, and so on.
Three weeks before the contest, after reviewing the scores I’d been sending him, Ed phoned to tell me that I needed to stop practicing all other events and begin focusing exclusively on the tea party. I rounded up friends and family and had them make up fictional biographies for me to memorize in my painstakingly appointed new palaces. Several unromantic dinners with my girlfriend were spent with her in character, telling me stories about her life as a Nebraska farmer or a suburban housewife or a Parisian seamstress, which I then recalled for her over dessert.
Then, one week before the championship, just at the moment when I wanted to be training hardest, Ed told me I had to stop. Mental athletes always halt their training a week before contests in order to do a spring cleaning of their memory palaces. They walk through them and mentally empty them of any lingering images, because in the heat of competition, the last thing you want to do is accidentally remember something you memorized last week. “Some competitors, when they get to a really high level, will not speak to anyone three days before a contest,” Tony Buzan told me. “They feel that any association that enters their head could interfere with associations they form in the contest.”
The plan had always been for Ed to be ringside at the U.S. championship. But shortly before the contest, he shipped off to Australia, where he’d been offered a unique opportunity to do philosophy research at the University of Sydney on the phenomenological issues raised by the sport of cricket. (He believes that the sport contains even better examples than chicken sexers or chess grand masters to illuminate his thesis that our immediate perception of the world is powerfully shaped by memory.) Suddenly it was no longer certain that he would be able to make the much longer and more expensive trip from the other side of the earth.
“Is there any way I can mediate your disgust at my potential nonappearance?” he asked in an e-mail a couple days before the contest. The emotion I was feeling was not so much disgust as panic. Though I’d told everyone I knew that I was approaching the contest as little more than a whim—“a strange way to spend a weekend morning” was how I put it to a friend—the jokes I sometimes made at the expense of this “kooky contest” concealed the truth that I was dead set on victory.
/> Ed’s last-minute decision to stay in Australia meant that I was on my own to worry about the other competitors, to speculate on how intensely they’d trained over the last year, and to wonder whether any of them were preparing to surprise us by unveiling a new technique that would take the sport to a level I could not reach. There was Ram Kolli, the cheery and insouciant defending champ, who I knew was the most natural talent of the group. If he had decided to train as hard as a European, the rest of us wouldn’t have a chance. But somehow I doubted he had it in him. Mostly I fretted about Maurice Stoll. If anyone might have committed the time to developing a Millennium PAO system like Ed’s, or a 2,704-image card system like Ben’s, I suspected it would be Maurice.
The evening before the championship, Ed e-mailed me one last piece of advice: “All you have to do is to savor the images, and really enjoy them. So long as you’re surprising yourself with their lively goodness, you’ll do just fine. Don’t at any stage worry. Take it easy, ignore the opposition, have fun. I’m proud of you already. And remember, girls dig scars and glory lasts forever.”
That night, I lay in bed obsessively marching through each of my palaces—first forward and then backward—and worrying about Maurice. I couldn’t sleep, which, as Maurice himself had observed at the previous year’s competition, is for a mental athlete “like breaking your leg before a soccer match.”
