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Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant | 
 enlarge | Author: Daniel Tammet
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $11.20
You Save: $2.80 (20%)
New (53) Used (48) Collectible (2) from $4.26
Rating:  131 reviews
Sales Rank: 1891
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 1416549013
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.196858820092
EAN: 9781416549017
ASIN: 1416549013
Publication Date: October 16, 2007
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Product Description
Born on a Blue Day is a journey into one of the most fascinating minds alive today -- guided by the owner himself. Daniel Tammet is virtually unique among people who have severe autistic disorders in that he is capable of living a fully independent life and able to explain what is happening inside his head.He 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 the most unimaginable mental powers, much like those portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man. Fascinating and inspiring, Born on a Blue Day explores what it' s like to be special and gives us an insight into what makes us all human -- our minds.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 126 more reviews...
 An astonishing book that will touch and warm your heart January 18, 2007
Yesh Prabhu, author of The Beech Tree (Plainsboro, New Jersey)
203 out of 210 found this review helpful
This is an astonishing book, written in first person. It is a memoir of the author's life with the "synaesthesia and savant syndrome", a rare form of Asperger's syndrome.
People with synaethesia see numbers as forms with color and texture, and days as vivid colors, and so Daniel Tammet has the ability to see in his mind numbers and days as colors, each number and day having its own distinct color as an attribute. A day with a color, like a flower with a scent! The blue day of the title of this book refers to Wednesday, which, like the number nine, he sees in his mind as blue. "I know it was a Wednesday," narrates Tammet, "because the date is blue in my mind and Wednesdays are always blue, like the number nine or the sound of loud voices arguing."
Daniel is also a savant, with a remarkable ability to multiply and divide given numbers with astonishing speed. He can recite from memory the number pi, 22 divided by 7, or 3.1428571 to 22,514 decimal places, a feat which will take him a little over five hours! He says numbers are beautiful things, and that pi is as beautiful as Mona Lisa.
Like Christopher John Francis Boone, the fifteen year old hero of Mark Haddon's novel, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time", Daniel, too, is very fond of prime numbers. "Prime numbers feel smooth, like pebbles," he says. He can recognize every prime number up to 9,973. He can speak in ten languages, including Icelandic, Lithuanian and Welsh, and he has the ability to learn a new language within a few days. He learnt Icelandic, for example, within a week; a most remarkable feat for any human being. He doesn't understand jokes easily, and the expressions on human faces he finds baffling. And like Christopher, he doesn't like to be touched.
He is perhaps the only person in this world with the "synaesthesia and savant syndrome" who has written a book in his own words, without using a ghost writer. What causes this syndrome is a mystery to neurologists; they have been trying to unravel the mystery, so far without much success. They speculate that a series of seizures Daniel suffered in his childhood might have caused the savant syndrome. But this is just their speculation; no one knows the real cause.
For a man who sees numbers and days as colors, this book is written in a simple, bland, colorless prose. Nevertheless, reading this book is a marvelous and rewarding experience. This book will touch and warm your heart.
Breathtaking! January 25, 2007
Janeane R. Henderson
92 out of 99 found this review helpful
A must read for parents and family of autistic children and adults. To finally discover an explanation for the little habits...obsession with spinning, walking in circles, plugging/covering of the ears, rocking... It's all here in one place. While I have become very accustomed to my son's habits, I have never understood what exactly was causing the behavior. After reading Tammet's book, I feel I can better help my son enjoy his environment.
Truly Unique Perspective on Autism from the Subject Himself January 31, 2007
Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA)
40 out of 42 found this review helpful
If a picture is truly worth a thousand words, then the savant gifts of Daniel Tammet are all the more startling because he has an ability to meld his senses together seamlessly to see things nobody else can. It's an impressive, even daunting prowess that comes at a high price since he has Asperger's syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes him to be limited in his ability to fit in with the larger culture, as well as synaesthesia, a condition where sounds, words or numbers can translate into colors, shapes or textures. In fact, the latter condition is reflected in the book's title as he associates the color blue with Wednesdays. What makes this book so thoroughly unique is that the book is not a treatise of a subject by a medical professional but a memoir by the subject himself.
As such, there are no grand conclusions drawn about either medical condition, or scientific assumptions of how Tammet came to his gifts. What the author does quite plainly is share how he approaches such astonishing feats as reciting pi to over 22,000 decimal points over the course of five hours. We get a palpable sense of how he perceives theorems and automatically develops strategies based on his innate sense with numbers and images. But before you can say Rain Man, you also see a young man who is actually functioning in the world on his own, which illustrates perfectly the spectrum of severity with autism. Tammet's affliction has mild enough for him to be relatively self-sufficient, even though his struggles to gain societal acceptance have been a traumatizing road.
Raised by loving parents, he spent most of his childhood alone and could only relate to fellow outsiders like immigrants and exchange students, people who heightened his facility for foreign languages. There were signs - a hyper-sensitivity to noise; almost complete literal-mindedness; a narrow but intense interests in a few, eccentric subjects at the exclusion of others; displays of socially inappropriate behavior (which he has since been able to manage); and peculiarities in speech and thought patterns. It all comes together as a fascinating portrait with no pretense toward a false sense of triumph over extreme adversity. Such clichés are better left to Lifetime TV-movies since Tammet lives a good, simple life in London with his life partner Neil Mitchell and is busy creating a new language and conquering other mathematical frontiers. One cannot help but root for him thanks to his wonderfully personal, unaffected memoir.
 this book is really not that good January 28, 2007
phritz
35 out of 194 found this review helpful
This book is rife with errors, both factual and mathematical. For example:
- the author claims that the sieve of eratosthenes is the fastest known factoring method when in fact it is the *slowest*
- the author cannot get the laws of arithmetic straight, for example writing that "4 + 1 x 4/2" equals 10, when it really equals 6. He means to write "((4 + 1) x 4) / 2".
But more importantly, there really isn't much of interest in it. The story about his life is moderately interesting, but the math and savant-related discussion is skin deep. For example, there is a paragraph about conditional probability that promises some insights into how bad we intuit probabilities. However the discussion fizzles and stops before it even get started, lasting (seriously) only about seven sentences. This happens again with a mention of fibonnaci numbers. And card counting. And pi. And so on.
If you'd never heard of autism or asperger's before, or if you never had high school math, you *might* find this book interesting. But if I were you I'd just go read the wikipedia articles instead.
A truly boring read.
Magical Number's Man February 17, 2007
James Hiller (Beaverton, OR)
33 out of 34 found this review helpful
Numbers have a special shape and color, according to autistic savant Daniel Tammet. Put together, they form beautiful and stunning shapes that his mind can see. Much like the wonderful book, Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin, Daniel's book allows us to see something that we use and think about everyday in such an interesting and unique light.
The awareness of autism is spreading across the country and our world like wildfire. Some statistic recently released said that one of our every 150 births results in an autistic child. The murky origins of this baffling condition are under study. It's people like Temple Grandin and Daniel Tammet that are finally allowing us to see, however brief and unique, a glimpse into the inner workings of an autistic mind. And what a fascinating journey it is.
Daniel Tammet recounts his early life, when a particularly jolting seizure at the age of four gripped him, possibly forever changing his mind and his thinking. Perhaps as a result of this seizure, Daniel begins to see numbers in their essence, shapes and colors in his mind, helping him perform amazing and miraculous math feats in seconds. Think Rain Man, and now, his moniker, Brain Man. Daniel knows math and the calendar, and worked to memorize pi so detailed that he could recite the string of numbers for five hours without a mistake. Daniel can also master a language after studying it for around a week, as he tells about in his quick study of one of the world's most challenging languages: Icelandic.
Such gifts comes with limitations, the limitations often found in the lives of autistic kids. Certain forms of touch drive him crazy, drastic changes in his routine are difficult to adjust to, morning porridge that must be 45 g (weighed everyday!). Idioms challenge him, as he prefers the literal to the implied. Yet, Daniel manages to cope with such details, with the love and support of his family and his partner Neil, and puts himself out here in the world to raise awareness of autism and help people understand it more.
Because of Daniel's detachment, the book may read to be a mere recounting of events. Daniels father becomes sick in the book, and Daniel recounts the event literally. Also his account of discovering his sexuality and falling in love also reads matter of fact. Yet, when Daniel expresses his emotions, it is both delightful and touching; he is befuddled about his tears, as if he's discovering them for the first time.
"Born on a Blue Day" is a wonderful journey with Daniel. I hope he knows what positive impact he can have on our lives by sharing a little bit of his. It's a wonderful way to walk in the shoes of an autistic savant, and experience, if only for a little bit, the life of Daniel. Thanks for sharing that, Daniel.
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