A few years ago I watched a documentary about a UK based savant called Daniel Tammet who had a unique ability to experience numbers as colours and/or sensations, a condition known assynesthesia.

His name cropped up in a Reddit thread about memory I was reading last week so I googled Daniel to see what he was up to and found born on a blue day; an early memoir about the savant’s life. It was written in 2007 and centers around his childhood up to just after the doc was made.

The read wasn’t bad, a little too ‘robotic’, such as the way he tells his story so linearly but I found it interesting to read about his aspergers and how one with the condition deals with building connections with people, his strict daily routines, and of course a look into his brilliant mind and how he visualise equations in his head.

Overall, it was nice to gain a little more insight into Daniel’s mind; how he effortlessly calculates sums, his experience reciting Pi to the 22,500th decimal place, and his extraordinary ability to learn languages, even Icelandic (which he learned in seven days), which most consider one of the most difficult languages to learn, but the drawn out description of his life is just too monotonous to recommend.

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