Daniel Tammet – Synesthesia on ABC Superhumans Feature
ABC featured a story on “SuperHumans!” a special edition of “20/20” Tuesday, June 1 at 10 p.m. ET. One of the guys of the special episode is Daniel Tammet. The 31-year-old Daniel Tammet is a genius, a gifted man with extraordinary brain that can calculate big numbers in the blink of an eye.
Tammet says he was born with the ability to experience numbers in an exceptionally vivid way.
“The numbers are moving in my mind,” he says. “Sometimes they’re fast, sometimes they’re slow. Sometimes they’re dark. Sometimes they’re bright. That emotion, that motion, that texture will be highly memorable for me.”
The phenomenon is called synesthesia, a mixture of the senses that results in a heightened sensory experience. Tammet is able to see and feel numbers. In his mind’s eye, every digit from zero to 10,000 is pictured as a 3-dimensional shape with a unique color and texture. For example, he says, the number fifteen is white, yellow, lumpy and round.
Tammet doesn’t need a calculator to solve exponential math problems such as 27 to the 7th power — that’s 27 multiplied by itself seven times — he’ll come up with the answer, 10,460,353,203, in a few seconds.
Tammet visualizes numbers in their unique forms and then melds them together to create a new image for the solution. When asked to multiply 53 by 131, he explains the solution in shapes and textures: “Fifty-three, which is round, very round…and larger at the bottom. Then you’ve got another number 131, which is longer a little bit like an hourglass. And there’s a space that’s created in between. That shape is the solution. 6,943!”
Watch the video:
