# Movie: Daniel Tammet - The Boy With The Incredible Brain

By Murray Bourne, 16 Jan 2009

Daniel Tammet has been able to perform large calculations in his head since he was 4 years old.

Would you like to be able to find the value of this without a calculator?

374 (which is 1,874,161 for those of you still trying to get 372 sorted out).

Or how about: 13 ÷ 97, to 35 decimal places?

Tammet is an autistic savant. Such people have extraordinary brain powers, but also often exhibit social withdrawal or similar issues.

He moves his fingers while calculating, and explains this by saying this is part of the way he "sees" numbers as colors and patterns.

Tammet is also brilliant with languages and writes courses in French and Spanish which you can purchase on his website.

In his book Embracing the Wide Sky, Tammet presents the view that we all have these abilities; we just need to release them.

Autistic thought, he argues, is an extreme variation of a kind that we all do, from daydreaming to the use of puns and metaphors.

On to the video. Here's part 1 of a series of 5 videos.

I featured this guy earlier in a shorter segment of this video — but this one gives the first part of the full program. Also, his books and language courses are interesting additions to the story.

See the 1 Comment below.

### One Comment on “Movie: Daniel Tammet - The Boy With The Incredible Brain”

1. Daniel says:

This is a lot like that Arthur Benjamin guy, the "Mathemagician" as he likes to call himself.

I found while watching his videos that it's not so much "magic" he's performing, but more like super-fast calculations in his head, much like this daniel tammet guy.

### Comment Preview

HTML: You can use simple tags like <b>, <a href="...">, etc.

To enter math, you can can either:

1. Use simple calculator-like input in the following format (surround your math in backticks, or qq on tablet or phone):
a^2 = sqrt(b^2 + c^2)
(See more on ASCIIMath syntax); or
2. Use simple LaTeX in the following format. Surround your math with $$ and $$.
$$\int g dx = \sqrt{\frac{a}{b}}$$
(This is standard simple LaTeX.)

NOTE: You can't mix both types of math entry in your comment.