Comments   Summary   Excerpt   Reviews   Author Notes

Summary: One of the world's fifty living autistic savants is the first and only to tell his compelling and inspiring life story-and explain how his incredible mind works.Worldwide, there are fewer than fifty living savants, those autistic individuals who can perform miraculous mental calculations or artistic feats (think Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man). Until now, none of them has ever been capable of discussing his or her thought processes, much less undertake the writing of a book. Daniel Tammet is the first.From childhood, Tammet's problems were immediately apparent. He was shunned by his classmates and often resorted to rocking and humming quietly. Yet he could memorize almost anything, and his math and language skills were astonishing. By the time he entered high school, Daniel was diagnosed as autistic, and he began to discover his own superhuman abilities-calculating huge sums in his head in seconds, learning new languages in one week, and memorizing more than 22,000