Moonwalking With Einstein (24 page)

TEN

THE LITTLE RAIN MAN IN ALL OF US

B
y February, a month before the U.S. Memory Championship, my suspicions that I might actually have a chance of doing well in the competition were beginning to be confirmed by my practice scores. In every event except the poem and speed numbers, my best practice scores were approaching the top marks of previous U.S. champions. Ed told me not to make too much of the fact. “You always do at least twenty percent worse under the lights,” he said, repeating advice he’d given me many times before. Still, I was rather stunned by the progress I’d made. In practice, I’d even managed to memorize a deck of cards in one minute and fifty-five seconds, a second faster than the U.S. record. In that day’s training log appears this note: “Maybe I could really win this thing?!” (Also, this inscrutable note: “Pay attention to DeVito’s remaining hair!!”)

What had begun as an exercise in participatory journalism had become an obsession. I had set out simply wanting to learn what the strange world of the memory circuit was all about, and to find out if my memory was indeed improvable. That I might be in a position to really win the U.S. championship seemed about as improbable as George Plimpton stepping into the ring with Archie Moore and actually knocking him out.

Everything I’d been told—by Ed, by Tony Buzan, by Anders Ericsson—suggested that my course of tedious training was the only way to achieve a more perfect memory. Nobody comes into the world with an inborn ability to remember loads of random digits or poetry at a single glance, or take pictures with the mind.

And yet, combing through the literature, one comes across a few rare cases here and there—perhaps less than a hundred in the last century—of savants with remarkable memories who appear to break the rules. What’s most striking about these individuals is that their exceptional memories—“memory without reckoning,” it’s been called—almost always coexist with profound disability. Some are musical prodigies, like Leslie Lemke, who is blind and brain damaged and couldn’t walk until he was fifteen, but can nevertheless play complicated musical pieces on the piano after hearing them just once. Some are artistic prodigies, like Alonzo Clemons, who has an IQ of 40 but can sculpt lifelike animals from memory after just a fleeting glimpse. Some have freakish mechanical skills, like James Henry Pullen, the nineteenth-century “Genius of Earlswood Asylum,” who was deaf and nearly mute, but built stunningly intricate model ships.

One day, after memorizing 138 digits in one of my five-minute practice sessions, I was sitting in front of the television, riffling through a deck of cards, as I often did to pass the time. I was looking at the queen of clubs, thinking about Roseanne Barr, about to form a disgusting memory, when I caught a trailer for a new documentary called
Brainman
about one of those rare prodigies. The subject of the film, which aired on the Science Channel, was a twenty-six-year-old British savant named Daniel Tammet, whose brain had been altered by an epileptic seizure he suffered as a toddler. Daniel could perform complex multiplication and division in his head, seemingly effortlessly. He could tell you if any number up to ten thousand was a prime. Most savants have just a single claim to exceptionality, a lone “island of genius,” but Daniel had a veritable archipelago. In addition to his lightning calculations, he was also a hyperpolyglot—a term used to describe the small number of people who can speak more than six languages. Daniel claimed to speak ten, and he said he learned Spanish in a single weekend. He’d even invented a language of his own called Mänti. To test his linguistic skills, the producers of
Brainman
flew Daniel to Iceland, and gave him one week to become conversational in Icelandic, one of the world’s most notoriously difficult languages. The talk-show host who tested him on national television at the end of the week pronounced himself “amazed.” Daniel’s tutor for the week called him a “genius” and “not human.”

The producers of the
Brainman
documentary also invited two of the world’s leading brain scientists, V. S. Ramachandran at the University of California, San Diego, and Simon Baron-Cohen at Cambridge, to each spend a day testing Daniel. They both concluded that he was literally a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. Unlike virtually every other savant who had ever been studied, he could explain what was going on in his head—often in vivid detail. Shai Azoulai, a graduate student in Ramachandran’s lab, proclaimed that Daniel “could be the linchpin that spawns off a new field of research.” Dr. Darold Treffert, an expert in savant syndrome, declared him one of only fifty people in the world who can be classified as a “prodigious savant.”

Even though it’s described as a syndrome, savantism is not actually a recognized medical condition, and has no set of standard diagnostic criteria. However, Treffert divides savants into three informal categories. There are “splinter skill” savants who have memorized a single esoteric body of trivia, like Treffert’s young patient who can tell you the year and model of a vacuum cleaner just from its unique hum. A second group, which he calls “talented savants,” have developed a more general area of expertise, like drawing or music, which is remarkable only because it stands in such stark contrast to their disability. The third group, prodigious savants, have abilities that would be spectacular by any standard, even if they weren’t accompanied by handicaps in other areas. It’s a subjective scale, but an important one, Treffert believes, because prodigious savants are members of one of the rarest classes of human being on the planet. When a new prodigious savant like Daniel is discovered, it is a very big deal.

The media devoured Daniel’s story. Newspapers in England and America ran glowing profiles of the eminently quotable “Boy with the Incredible Brain.” He appeared on
The Late Show with David Letterman
, where he calculated the day of the week Dave was born on (Saturday), and on the
Richard Judy
program, the closest thing Britain has to Oprah. His memoir,
Born on a Blue Day,
became a
New York Times
bestseller in America, and quickly rose to number one in the Amazon UK rankings. Daniel became perhaps the most famous living savant in the world.

What interested me most about Daniel was his extraordinary memory. In 2003, he set a new European record by reciting the first 22,514 digits of pi from memory. It took him five hours and nine minutes, sitting in the basement of the Science Museum at Oxford University, and he says he did it without any mnemonic techniques beyond his powerful raw memory. Here, it seemed, was someone with the same astounding abilities as the mental athletes, but they came to him entirely without effort. It was almost impossible to believe. Meanwhile, I was putting in torturous hours taking mental strolls through every home I’d ever visited, every school I’d ever attended, and every library I’d ever worked in so that they could be converted into memory palaces. I wondered why a savant like Daniel never competed in memory contests. Surely he’d wipe the floor with the trained mnemonists, I imagined.

The more I researched Daniel’s story, the more fascinated I was by the differences between him and the mental athletes I’d come to know—and the mental athlete I was rapidly becoming myself. I knew how the mnemonists did it: They’d improved their memories through rigorous training, using ancient techniques. I’d even done it myself. But I didn’t understand where Daniel’s powers of recall came from. Daniel, like the journalist S before him, seemed to have an innate ability to remember. How was his brain different from mine? And did he have any tricks up his sleeve that could give me an advantage at the U.S. championship?

I decided that I
would try to meet up with Daniel. He invited me to the home he shared with his partner, Neil, at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac in the scenic seaside town of Kent, England. We ended up spending two full afternoons together in his living room, chatting over tea and fish and chips. Daniel was skinny, with short blond hair, glasses, and birdlike features. He was gentle, soft-spoken, charming, and hyperarticulate—equally comfortable explaining his bizarre memory as opining on why
The West Wing
was the most thoughtful American television program. I suppose I’d come expecting some kind of freak, and so I was taken aback by how surprisingly ordinary Daniel seemed—even more ordinary than some of the mental athletes I’d come to know. In fact, if he hadn’t told me, I’m not sure I’d ever have guessed that there was anything unusual about him. However, Daniel assured me that despite appearances, he was anything but normal. “You should have met me fifteen years ago. You’d have said, ‘Boy, that guy has autism!’ ”

Daniel is the oldest of nine children. He grew up in subsidized housing in East London and had what he calls “a very difficult” childhood that “seems like something out of Dickens.” In
Born on a Blue Day
, he describes the massive epileptic seizure he suffered as a four-year-old: It was “an experience unlike any other, as though the room around me was pulling away from me on all sides and the light inside it leaking out and the flow of time itself coagulated and stretched out into a single lingering moment.” Had his father not rushed him to the emergency room in the back of a taxi, that seizure very probably would have killed Daniel. Instead, he believes it was the moment he became a savant.

According to Baron-Cohen, two rare conditions may have conspired to produce Daniel’s savant abilities. The first is synesthesia, the same perceptual disorder that afflicted the journalist S, in which the senses are intertwined. By one estimate, there are more than a hundred different varieties of the disorder. For S, sounds conjured up visual imagery. In Daniel’s case, numbers take on a distinctive shape, color, texture, and emotional “tone.” The number 9, for example, is tall, dark blue, and ominous, while 37 is “lumpy like porridge” and 89 resembles falling snow. Daniel says he has a unique synesthetic reaction like that for every number up to 10,000, and that experiencing numbers in this way allows him to do quick mental math without pencil or paper. To multiply two numbers, he sees each number’s shape floating in his mind’s eye. Intuitively, and without effort, he says, a third shape, the answer, forms in the negative space between them. “It’s like a crystallization. It’s like developing a photo,” Daniel told me. “Division is just the reverse of multiplication. I see the number and I pull it apart in my head. It’s like leaves falling from a tree.” Daniel believes his synesthetic shapes somehow implicitly encode important information about the properties of numbers. Prime numbers, for example, have a “pebble-like quality.” They’re soft and round, without the jagged edges of numbers that can be factorized.

Daniel’s other rare condition is Asperger’s syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. Autism was first identified in 1943 by the child psychiatrist Leo Kanner. He described it as a form of social impairment, a disorder in which, as Kanner put it, patients “treat people as if they were things.” Along with this inability to empathize, autistic individuals have a host of other problems, including language impairment, an extremely focused range of interests, and “an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness.” A year after Kanner first wrote about autism, an Austrian pediatrician named Hans Asperger noted another disorder that seemed almost identical except that Asperger’s patients had strong linguistic abilities and fewer intellectual impairments. He called his precocious young patients, with their bottomless wells of arcane trivia, “little professors.” It wasn’t until 1981 that Asperger’s was recognized as its own separate syndrome.

Daniel’s Asperger’s diagnosis was made by Baron-Cohen, who runs the Cambridge Autism Research Centre and who also happens to be one of the world’s leading authorities on synesthesia. “If you saw him today, you wouldn’t necessarily think that this guy has a form of autism,” Baron-Cohen told me over tea in his Trinity College office one afternoon. “It’s only in the context of hearing his developmental history. I said to him, ‘Your development suggests that when you were younger you had Asperger’s syndrome, whereas looking at you today, you’ve made such a good adaptation and you’re functioning so very well that you don’t necessarily need a diagnosis. It’s up to you whether you want one or not. He said, ‘Yes, I prefer to have it.’ It gave him a new way of looking at himself. That’s fine. It fits with his profile.”

In his memoir, Daniel writes extensively about the effects of growing up with undiagnosed Asperger’s. “What must the other children have made of me? I don’t know, because I have no memory of them at all. To me they were the background to my visual and tactile experiences.” Throughout his childhood, Daniel was afflicted with a passion for trivia. He collected leaflets and counted everything, and developed an obsessive, encyclopedic knowledge of the popular 1970s soft-rock duo the Carpenters. He frequently got into trouble for taking things far too literally. After extending his middle finger in the direction of a schoolmate, he was surprised at the reprimand he received. “How can a finger swear?” he wondered. Empathy did not come easily. “I had no concept of deception,” he says. “I’ve worked so hard to reach this place where I can be really normal, where I can have a conversation and know when to start and stop talking, and remember to make eye contact.” Despite having apparently conquered his most debilitating social problems, to this day, Daniel says he still can’t shave himself, or drive a car. The sound of the toothbrush scratching his teeth drives him mad. He says he avoids public places, and is obsessive about small things. For breakfast, he measures out exactly forty-five grams of porridge on an electric scale.