Comments on: Daniel Tammet the savant

Daniel Tammet the savant

stbalbach — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:51:48 -0800

Daniel Tammet (60 Minutes clips) is a highly functioning autistic savant able to learn Icelandic in a single week and recite PI to 22,500 places. "Savants can't usually tell us how they do what they do. It just comes to them. Daniel can. He could be the 'Rosetta Stone." Previously on MeFi, he has a new book and movie (Google Video, 48m).

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:53:20 -0800

Wikipedia.

By: taursir

taursir — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:08:58 -0800

Yeah, I pretty much can't tell you how I learn languages once I get past explaining what I do on the outside. I read books, and listen and speak, but what that is deep down? Who knows.

By: Astragalus

Astragalus — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:36:40 -0800

I almost feel like he's lying when he describes dividing weird numbers as some kind of sparkly metallic shape - come on, you've got to be doing some kind of long division in there, even if it's very effective, sparkly long division. Plus what is he pointing at and pushing around if not digits? I find his explanations a bit unenlightening.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:52:19 -0800

He can intuitively see patterns, like great chess players, from years of experience, filter out the noise of the many possibilities and zero in on the likely solutions.

By: geoff.

geoff. — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:58:14 -0800

The Thomas Newman "American Beauty" soundtrack was annoying.

By: bardic

bardic — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:22:46 -0800

Plus what is he pointing at and pushing around if not digits? Synesthesia, the ultimate form of thinking outside the box. Actually, more like feeling outside the box. But this stuff is fascinating.

By: Goofyy

Goofyy — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:38:03 -0800

The Yahoo video crashed Firefox entirely, after showing a couple segments. Any way to move tabs to separate windows?

By: dobbs

dobbs — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:39:09 -0800

Astragalus, you mustn't have watched the movie link as your questions and queries are addressed in it.

By: longsleeves

longsleeves — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:53:23 -0800

When I was four or five years old, the name "Sarah" evoked for me a stylized mop leaning against a wall to the right - mop head up. Other words chimed pictures in my head but most of the visual associations are long gone.

By: phaedon

phaedon — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 22:33:34 -0800

last week's askmefi thread where daniel tammet comes up.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 06:01:00 -0800

I gnashed my teeth when I got to this in the Wikipedia article: "Tammet was challenged to learn Icelandic, one of the worlds hardest languages, in one week." [Emphasis added.] Fortunately, it being Wikipedia, I simply deleted the idiotic characterization. (I've seen a lot of languages called "the world's hardest" before, but Icelandic?? It's just another Germanic language, people.)

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 07:39:57 -0800

Hmm.. well I guess 60-minutes video was wrong about Icelandic then. It does seem pretty hard they use these strange sucking noises that other languages don't, kind of like Bushmen clicks..but sucks.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 08:56:25 -0800

Synesthesia, the ultimate form of thinking outside the box. Actually, more like feeling outside the box. But this stuff is fascinating. Synesthesia is not a form of "thinking" it happens before things are actually read and it's caused by a physical brain process. It's also not related to autism, as far as I know. As far as I know. Synesthesia isn't some skill you can develop (although wikipedia indicates you can get it from a stroke, or hallucinogenic drugs) Anyway, who knows if this guy is telling the truth or not. Impressive mathematical feats can be learned, and there is no reason someone couldn't memorize a "program" for calculating the digits of pi, rather then memorizing the digits themselves, a lot of people do this as some kind of hobby.

By: jack_mo

jack_mo — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:26:18 -0800

Anyway, who knows if this guy is telling the truth or not. Having seen multiple documentaries on Tammet, including the one linked above (which isn't a 'movie'), where his claims to visualise numbers and their interactions were very rigorously tested, and found to be genuine, I'm going with 'telling the truth'. Do you have a bit of a thing against savants, delmoi?

By: MapGuy

MapGuy — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 10:08:18 -0800

Icelandic is not that hard, it has quite a few cognates with other Scandinavian languages, which in turn share many cognates with English. Who couldn't learn to do a decent interview in Icelandic in a week? Nerdburger still has a rotten accent, so I will give him a C+. I would like to see him train for a week and go kick Cro Cop's ass. Now that would be cool. I can do double digit cube roots in my head i.e. what is the cube root of 185193? Yet, still I have only achieved half of the coveted title idiot savant.

By: vronsky

vronsky — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:25:16 -0800

"what is the cube root of 185193?" That's easy. 42. (sorry, just wanted to piss off languagehat:)

By: languagehat

languagehat — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:49:48 -0800

*gnashes teeth* It does seem pretty hard they use these strange sucking noises that other languages don't, kind of like Bushmen clicks Huh? The weirdest phonemes it has are preaspirated voiceless stops, and they're 1) not that uncommon, and 2) quite easy to learn to produce. And MapGuy says he has a rotten accent, so it would seem he hasn't exactly mastered the phonemes. You want a hard language? Try Georgian (where the case of the subject of a sentence varies according to the tense of the verb), or an Australian Aboriginal language.

By: Samuel Farrow

Samuel Farrow — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 12:28:17 -0800

We had a "creative" session at work yesterday - and afterwards I experienced a wave of dejavu. I remembered someone saying to me recently they experience dejavu after thinking "creatively" for long periods of time but then couldn't be sure if it had indeed actually happened. The brain is a funny place to live in, subjectively.

By: taursir

taursir — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:02:10 -0800

Languagehat: The weirder things Icelandic has that may be being referenced here are the voiceless nasal stops, and other voiceless sonorants (which seems to be some sort of oxymoron; voiceless sonorants). As for what the strange sucking noises could possibly be, well, maybe there's something to do with all that ingressive breathing in scandinavia. Otherwise, I wouldn't think of comparing icelandic to "bushmen", because well, no clicks and no actual other phonemic and odd voicing modes.

By: Samuel Farrow

Samuel Farrow — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:09:51 -0800

Languagehat writes: the case of the subject of a sentence varies according to the tense of the verb - I was going to ask how this is different from latin, but having thought about it realise how it is - wow. Yeah and aboriginal where nouns and verbs aren't even abstracted. Double wow.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:46:41 -0800

*gnashes teeth* They do that too, it means "I'm pissed", or "let's have dinner" - a common source of confusion and embarrassment for non-natives. taursir, "nasal stops" was what I meant, discussed in the documentary.

By: hincandenza

hincandenza — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 15:30:07 -0800

delmoi: Impressive mathematical feats can be learned, and there is no reason someone couldn't memorize a "program" for calculating the digits of pi, rather then memorizing the digits themselves, a lot of people do this as some kind of hobby.

I can't believe that comment went completely passed over- memorizing, by first inventing, a program to produce digits of pi would seem vastly more impressive than simply memorizing the digits. Granted, I seem to recall a formula was actually discovered a few years' back, but even if that was a valid formula, I recall it being so beastly in shape that being able to compute it in one's head would be unquestionably savant-like...