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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.

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