Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

by Daniel Tammet

  Certain sentence structures can be particularly hard for me to analyse, such as: ‘He is not inexperienced in such things’, where the two negatives (‘not’ and ‘in-’) cancel each other out. It is much better if people just say: ‘He is experienced in such things’. Another example is when a sentence begins: ‘Don’t you …?’ as in, ‘Don’t you think we should go now?’ or ‘Don’t you want ice cream?’. Then I become very confused and my head starts to hurt because the questioner is not being clear whether he means: ‘Do you want an ice cream?’ or ‘Is it correct that you don’t want an ice cream?’ and it’s possible to answer both questions with a ‘yes’, but I don’t like it when the same word can mean two completely different things.

  As a child, I found idiomatic language particularly confusing. Describing someone as ‘under the weather’ was very strange to me because, I thought, isn’t everyone under the weather? Another common saying that puzzled me was when my parents might excuse one of my brother’s grumpy behaviour by saying: ‘He must have got out of the wrong side of bed this morning.’ ‘Why didn’t he get out of the right side of the bed?’ I asked.

  In recent years, scientists have become more and more interested in studying the kind of synaesthetic experiences in language that I have, in order to find out more about the phenomenon and its origins. Professor Vilayanur Ramachandran of California’s Center for Brain Studies in San Diego, has researched synaesthesia for more than a decade and believes there may be a link between the neurological basis for synaesthetic experiences and the linguistic creativity of poets and writers. According to one study, the condition is seven times as common in creative people as in the general population.

  In particular, Professor Ramachandran points to the facility with which creative writers think up and use metaphors – a form of language where a comparison is made between two seemingly unrelated things – and compares this to the linking of seemingly unrelated entities such as colours and words, or shapes and numbers in synaesthesia.

  Some scientists believe that high-level concepts (including numbers and language) are anchored in specific regions of the brain and that synaesthesia might be caused by excess communication between these different regions. Such ‘crossed wiring’ could lead to both synaesthesia and to a propensity toward the making of links between seemingly unrelated ideas.

  William Shakespeare, for example, was a frequent user of metaphors; many of which are synaesthetic, involving a link to the senses. For example, in Hamlet, Shakespeare has the character Francisco say that it is ‘bitter cold’ – combining the sensation of coldness with the taste of bitterness. In another play, The Tempest, Shakespeare goes beyond metaphors involving only the senses and links concrete experiences with more abstract ideas. His expression: ‘This music crept by me upon the waters,’ connects the abstract ‘music’ with a creeping action. The reader is able to imagine music – something normally very difficult to create a mental picture of – as a moving animal.

  But it isn’t only very creative people who make these connections – everyone does. We all rely on synaesthesia to a greater or lesser degree. In their book Metaphors We Live By, language scientist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson argue that metaphors are not arbitrary constructions but follow particular patterns, which in turn structure thought. They give as examples expressions that indicate the links: ‘happy’ = ‘up’ and ‘sad’ = ‘down’: I’m feeling up, my spirits rose; I’m feeling down, he’s really low. Or ‘more’ = ‘up’ and ‘less’ = ‘down’: My income rose last year; the number of errors is very low. Lakoff and Johnson suggest that many of these patterns emerge from our everyday, physical experiences; for example, the link ‘sad’ = ‘down’ may be related to the way that posture droops when a person is feeling sad. Similarly, the link ‘more’ = ‘up’ may come from the fact that when you add an object or substance to a container or pile, the level goes up.

  Other language scientists have noted that some of the structural features of many words not normally associated with any function, such as initial phoneme groups, have a noticeable affect on the reader/listener. For example for ‘sl-’ there is: ‘slack’, ‘slouch’, ‘sludge’, ‘slime’, ‘slosh’, ‘sloppy’, ‘slug’, ‘slut’, ‘slang’, ‘sly’, ‘slow’, ‘sloth’, ‘sleepy’, ‘slipshod’, ‘slovenly’, ‘slum’, ‘slobber’, ‘slur’, ‘slog’ … where all these words have negative connotations and some are particularly pejorative.

  The idea that certain types of sounds ‘fit’ particular objects better than others goes back to the time of the Ancient Greeks. An obvious illustration of this is onomatopoeia, a type of word that sounds like the thing it is describing (‘fizz’, ‘whack’, ‘bang’ etc.). In a test carried out by researchers in the 1960s, artificial words were constructed using particular letters and combinations of letters thought to link to positive or negative feelings. After hearing the invented words, the subjects were asked to match English words for pleasant or unpleasant emotions with one or other of two invented words. The appropriate matches were made significantly more often than would be expected by chance.

  This type of latent language synaesthesia in virtually everyone can also be seen in an experiment originally carried out in the 1920s, which investigated a possible link between visual patterns and the sound-structures of words. The researcher, Wolfgang Köhler, a German-American psychologist, used two arbitrary visual shapes, one smooth and rounded and the other sharp and angular, and invented two words for them: ‘takete’ and ‘maluma’. Subjects were asked to say which of the shapes was the ‘takete’ and which the ‘maluma’. The overwhelming majority assigned ‘maluma’ to the rounded shape and ‘takete’ to the angular one. Recently, Professor Ramachandran’s team has replicated the results of this test using the invented words ‘bouba’ and ‘kiki’. 95% of those asked thought the rounded shape was a ‘bouba’ and the pointed shape a ‘kiki’. Ramachandran suggests the reason is that the sharp changes in the visual direction of the lines in the ‘kiki’ figure mimics the sharp phonemic inflections of the word’s sound, as well as the sharp inflection of the tongue on the palate.

  Professor Ramachandran believes this synaesthetic connection between our hearing and seeing senses was an important first step towards the creation of words in early humans. According to this theory, our ancestors would have begun to talk by using sounds that evoked the object they wanted to describe. He also points out that lip and tongue movements may be synaesthetically linked to objects and events they refer to. For example, words referring to something small often involve making a synaesthetic small ‘i’ sound with the lips and a narrowing of the vocal tracts: ‘little’, ‘teeny’, ‘petite’, whereas the opposite is true of words denoting something large or enormous. If the theory is right then language emerged from the vast array of synaesthetic connections in the human brain.

  An interesting question that language researchers are beginning to explore is whether or not my ability with languages extends to other forms of language, such as sign language. In 2005 I participated in an experiment carried out by Gary Morgan of the Department of Language and Communication Science at City University in London. Dr Morgan is a researcher in British Sign Language (BSL), the first or preferred language of around 70,000 deaf or hearing-impaired people in the UK. Many thousands of hearing people also use BSL, which is a visual/spatial language that uses the hands, body, face and head to convey meaning. The test was designed to see whether I could learn signed words as quickly and easily as written or spoken ones. A signer sat opposite me at a table and produced a total of sixty-eight different signs. After each I was shown a page with four illustrations and asked to indicate the one that I thought best described the sign I had just been shown. The signed words varied in meaning from the relatively simple ‘hat’ to more difficult signs for concepts such as ‘restaurant’ and ‘agriculture’. I was able to correctly identify two-thirds of the signs from the possible choices presented to me and it was concluded that I showed ‘very
good sign aptitude’. The researchers now plan to teach me British Sign Language using one-to-one tuition with a signer to compare my acquisition of the language with that of the others I know.

  Esperanto is another very different kind of language. I first read the word ‘Esperanto’ many years ago in a library book, but it was only following the purchase of my first computer that I discovered any more about it. What drew me most of all to the language was the fact that its vocabulary is a blend of various languages, mostly European, while its grammar is consistent and logical. I very quickly esperantiis (became a speaker of Esperanto) from reading various online texts in the language and from writing to other Esperanto speakers from all over the world.

  The Esperanto language (the word means ‘one who hopes’) was the creation of Dr Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, an eye doctor from Bialystok in what is now Poland. He first published his language in 1887 and the first world congress of Esperanto speakers was held in France in 1905. Zamenhof’s goal was to create an easy-to-learn universal second language to help foster international understanding. Today, there are estimated to be somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 Esperanto speakers worldwide.

  Esperanto’s grammar has several interesting features. The first is that the different parts of speech are marked by their own suffixes: all nouns end in -o, all adjectives in -a, adverbs in -e, infinitives in -i. For example: the word rapido would translate as ‘speed’, rapida as ‘quick’, rapide as ‘quickly’ and rapidi as ‘to hurry’.

  Verbs do not change for the subject, as in most natural languages: mi estas (‘I am’), vi estas (‘you are’), li estas (‘he is’), i estas (‘she is’), ni estas (‘we are’), ili estas (‘they are’). Past tense verbs always end in -is (mi estis – ‘I was’), future tense in -os (vi estos – ‘you will be’).

  Many of Esperanto’s words are formed using affixes – the ending ‘-ejo’, for example, signifies ‘place’, as in the words: lernejo (‘school’), infanejo (‘nursery’) and trinkejo (‘bar’). Another commonly used suffix is ‘-ilo’, meaning ‘tool or instrument’, and is found in words such as: hakilo (‘axe’), flugilo (‘wing’) and serilo (‘search engine’).

  Perhaps the most famous feature of Esperanto’s word-building grammar is its use of the prefix ‘mal-’ to indicate the opposite of something. This feature is used extensively throughout the language: bona (‘good’) – malbona (‘evil’), ria (‘rich’) – malria (‘poor’), granda (‘big’) – malgranda (‘small’), dekstra (‘right’) – maldekstra (‘left’), fermi (‘to close’) – malfermi (‘to open’), amiko (‘friend’) – malamiko (‘enemy’).

  The creation and use of idiomatic speech is generally discouraged in Esperanto, however some examples of ‘Esperanto slang’ do exist. A new learner of the language might be called a frebakito from the German frischgebacken (‘fresh-baked’), where the standard Esperanto word would be a komencanto (‘beginner’). An example of an Esperanto euphemism is la necesejo (‘the necessary place’) for a bathroom/WC.

  Tony Attwood, a clinical psychologist and author of Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals, notes that some individuals with Asperger’s have the ability to create their own form of language (known as neologisms). He gives as examples a girl’s description of her ankle as ‘the wrist of my foot’ and ice cubes as ‘water bones’. Dr Attwood describes this ability as ‘one of the endearing and genuinely creative aspects of Asperger’s syndrome’. After the birth of my twin sisters I created the word biplets to describe them, knowing that a bicycle had two wheels and a tricycle three, and that the name for three babies born at one time was triplets. Another of my childhood neologisms was the word pramble meaning to go out for a long walk (a ramble) with a baby in a pram; something my parents did frequently.

  For several years as a child I tinkered with the idea of creating my own language, as a way of relieving the loneliness I often felt and to draw on the delight I experienced in words. Sometimes, when I felt a particularly strong emotion or experienced something that I felt was especially beautiful, a new word would spontaneously form in my mind to express it and I had no idea where those words came from. In contrast, I often found the language of my peers jarring and confusing. I was regularly teased for speaking in long, careful and overly formal sentences. When I tried to use one of my own created words in conversation, to express something of what I was feeling or experiencing inside, it was rarely understood. My parents discouraged me from ‘talking in a funny way’.

  I continued to dream that one day I would speak a language that was my own, that I would not be teased or reprimanded for using and that would express something of what it felt to be me. After leaving school I found I had the time to begin seriously to pursue such an idea. I wrote words down as they occurred to me and experimented with different methods of pronunciation and sentence building. I called my language ‘Mänti’ (pronounced ‘man-tee’) from the Finnish word mänty meaning pine tree. Pines are native to most of the Northern hemisphere and are particularly numerous across parts of Scandinavia and the Baltic region. Many of the words used in Mänti are of Scandinavian and Baltic origin. There is another reason for the choice of name: pine trees often grow together in large numbers and symbolise friendship and community.

  Mänti is a work in progress with a developed grammar and a vocabulary of more than a thousand words. It has attracted the interest of several language researchers who believe it may help shed more light on my linguistic abilities.

  One of the things I like most about playing with language is the creation of new words and ideas. I try in Mänti to make the words reflect the relationships between different things: hamma (‘tooth’) and hemme (‘ant’ – a biting insect) and rât (‘wire’) and râtio (‘radio’) for example. Some words have multiple, related meanings; the word puhu for example can mean ‘wind’, ‘breath’ or ‘spirit’.

  Compound words are common in Mänti: puhekello (‘telephone’, literally ‘speak-bell’), ilmalv (‘aeroplane’, literally ‘airship’), tontöö (‘music’, literally ‘tone art’) and rtalö (‘parliament’, literally ‘discussion place’) are various examples.

  Abstracts are handled in a number of ways in Mänti. One is to create a compound to describe it: ‘tardiness’ or ‘lateness’ is translated as kellokült (literally ‘clock-debt’). Another method is to use ‘word pairs’, as can be found in Finno-Ugrian languages such as Estonian. For a word such as ‘dairy (produce)’ the Mänti equivalent is pîmat kermat (‘milks creams’) and for ‘footwear’ it is koet saapat (‘shoes boots’).

  Although Mänti is very different from English, there are quite a lot of words that are recognisable to English speakers: nekka (‘neck’), kuppi (‘cup’), purssi (‘wallet’), nööt (‘night’) and pêpi (‘baby’) are examples.

  Mänti exists as a tangible, communicable expression of my inner world. Each word, shining with colour and texture, to me is like a piece of art. When I think or speak in Mänti, I feel as though I am painting in words.

  10

  A Very Large Slice of Pi

  I first learned about the number pi in my maths class at school. Pi – the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter – is mathematics’ most celebrated number; the name comes from the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet (π), the symbol being adopted by the mathematician Euler in 1737. I was immediately fascinated by it and learned as many of its decimal digits as I could find from various library books, hundreds of them in total. Then, in late 2003, I received a phone call from my father who reminded me at the end of the conversation that it had been twenty years since my early childhood seizures. He said that I should be proud of the progress I had made in the time since. I thought about what he said for a long time afterwards and decided that I wanted to do something to show that my childhood experience of epilepsy had not held me back. Later that week I contacted the fundraising department of the National Society for Epilepsy, the largest epilepsy charity organisation in the UK. To
help raise funds for the NSE, my plan was to learn as many digits of the number pi as I could in correct sequence, before a public recitation in three months’ time, on 14 March – International Pi Day (14 March is 3/14 in US notation) – which is also Einstein’s birthday. The charity was excited by the idea and suggested that I attempt to break the European record, so a target of 22,500 digits was set. While I began learning the numbers, the charity’s fundraising manager Simon Ekless organised the setting for the recitation, the Ashmolean Building at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, where among the various exhibits is one of Albert Einstein’s blackboards.

  Pi is an irrational number, which means that it cannot be written as a simple fraction of two whole numbers. It is also infinite: the digits to the right of the decimal point go on forever in a never-ending numerical stream, so that it isn’t possible for someone to write down the number pi exactly, even if he or she had a piece of paper as big as the universe to write it on. For this reason, calculations must always use approximations of pi, such as 22 ÷ 7 or 355 ÷ 113. The number appears in all sorts of unexpected places in mathematics besides circles and spheres. For example, it occurs in the distribution of primes and in the probability that a pin dropped on a set of parallel lines will intersect a line. Pi also appears as the average ratio of the actual length and the direct distance between source and mouth in a meandering river.

  The earliest values of pi were almost certainly found by measurement. There is good evidence that the ancient Egyptians had 4(8/9)2 = 3.16 as a value for pi, while the Babylonians used the approximation 3 + 1/8 = 3.125. The Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse gave the first theoretical calculation for the value of pi in around 250 BC. He determined the upper and lower range of pi by finding the perimeters of a polygon inscribed within a circle, which is less than the circumference of a circle (Fig.1) and of a polygon circumscribed outside a circle, which is greater than the circumference (Fig.2).