Born on a Blue Day

While working on C&C’s cabinet I listened to the book Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet. The publisher describes the book as “a journey into one of the most fascinating minds alive today — guided by its owner himself. Daniel Tammet sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures, and he can perform extraordinary calculations in his head. He can learn to speak new languages fluently, from scratch, in a week. In 2004, he memorized and recited more than 22,000 digits of pi, setting a record. He has savant syndrome, an extremely rare condition that gives him almost unimaginable mental powers, much like those portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man.

Daniel has a compulsive need for order and routine — he eats the same precise amount of cereal for breakfast every morning and cannot leave the house without counting the number of items of clothing he's wearing. When he gets stressed or is unhappy, he closes his eyes and counts. But in one crucial way Daniel is not at all like the Rain Man: he is virtually unique among people who have severe autistic disorders in that he is capable of living a fully independent life. He has emerged from the "other side" of autism with the ability to function successfully — he is even able to explain what is happening inside his head.”

The fact that the book was read by the author himself added another dimension to my enjoyment.

It was interesting to see little bits of him in myself and the people I know in his personality quirks.

The primary reason he made it was because he had loving and understanding support all his life from his family and friends.

For the first time I was able to understand what goes on in these people’s minds and it opens up a world of new questions about how the mind works.

At the end of the book the author finds it remarkable that he is accepted and honored in the adult world for his differences—the same differences that made him an object of ridicule and taunting when he was a child.