Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (2007) is Daniel Tammet’s memoir, explaining how his high-functioning autistic mind works. Articulate first-hand accounts of how a person thinks, in terms of processes, is a rarity, and hence these insights are all the more amazing – especially to psychologists and neurologists. His message is that for him, and others, it is ‘ultimately possible to lead a happy and productive life.’
British-born Tammet is 27 years old at the time of writing – with Asperger’s syndrome. He acquired his savant abilities after childhood epileptic seizures and central nervous system trauma. He explains the difficulty in interacting and communicating with people, and his frustrations. He can learn a language in a week, and he has the capacity to memorize almost everything and solve complicated calculations with the speed and accuracy of a computer. Like Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal in the 1988 film Rain Man about Raymond Babbitt (inspired by real-life Kim Peek), a 2005 documentary of Daniel Tammet is called Brainman.
Tammet describes listening to people like listening to a radio station – ‘knowing when someone expects you to reply to a statement is just not intuitive for me’ – and his feelings of being the odd one out. He writes of his difficulties with the English language, because he is so literal. He writes of being a volunteer English-language teacher in Lithuania, finding love, the challenges of finding employment, and meeting 56-year-old Kim Peek, which is a wonderfully poignant chapter.
He describes the events and things that intrigued him as a child, how his parents nurtured him, and his love of books: ‘whenever my parents were reading, the room would fill with silence. It made me feel calm and content inside.’ I liked his recollections about books, explaining their influences on him, from the Mr Men series to Dostoevsky.
He has synesthesia (which occurs in only 1% of the population), in which he sees numbers and words as shapes, colors, textures and motions: ‘five is a clap of thunder … thirty-seven is lumpy, like porridge, while eighty-nine reminds me of falling snow … Richards are red, Johns are yellow and Henrys are white.’
The book is not just about his mind, but about his world, and his daily life. It is a fascinating, well-written, comprehensible and comprehensive break-down of Daniel Tammet’s mind that makes him unique, and sheds a spotlight on autism and Asperger’s syndrome in a positive and inspirational way.
MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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