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

#202
Title: Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
Author: Daniel Tammet
Publisher: Free Press
Year: 2006
250 pages

Tammet describes his life as a child and adolescent with undiagnosed Asperger's. He was later identified as a person with mathematical savantism, rare in people with generally normal cognitive skills. I was fascinated by Tammet's descriptions of how he learns and the role synesthesia plays in his recall. I do not have Asperger's, but aspects of Tammet's descriptions are very familiar to me, particularly when he discusses language acquisition. (Like a certain number of adolescents, I also memorized a hunk of pi, though only to 100 places. Like Tammet, I have favorite sections.)

What I'd really enjoy is to see Tammet's draft of a section before editing. I'm very curious about the extent to which he and other authors in the autistic spectrum are able to imagine a reader's interests and present their thoughts so that another person could easily engage with them. I always wonder to what extent editing in the direction of psychological connection with the reader may mask an autistic way of telling the story.

I won't list the growing body of writing by people with autistic spectrum disorders. Send me a note if you'd like recommendations. Given Tammet's conjecture that an early episode of epilepsy may be responsible for his savantism, this would be interesting to read with Taylor's My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, where the brain damage caused by the author's stroke caused the expression of typically-suppressed functions opf other areas of the brain.