The Boy With The Incredible Brain
- 23 May 05, 12:00 AM
Crippled Monkey has noticed that there is another one of those "The Boy With" disability programmes on TV tonight. Step forward The Boy With The Incredible Brain.
It's a documentary about 26 year-old Daniel Tammet, who they're billing as a "British Rain Man". He learnt how to speak Icelandic in 15 hours, can recite pi to 22514 places, and can tell you the day of the week on any given date in the last 100 years.
One of few known savants in the world, Daniel is different because he can explain how he does it, unlike the Raymond Babbitt character played by Dustin Hoffman. Scientists believe he could unlock the door to autism and to memory recall in everyone.
More about our man: Daniel traces back his extraordinary mental ability to a set of seizures he had as a child. He runs an online learning company called Optimnem. He appeared on the David Letterman show recently. He lives with his partner Neil, a computer programmer who he met online, in a quiet part of Kent. And he did rather a good with The Guardian back in February that is really worth a read.
The documentary sees Daniel undergo many scientific tests. He also plays his first game of blackjack in a Las Vegas casino and meets Kim Peek - the real-life inspiration for the film Rain Man - who demonstrates his incredible photographic memory.
Tune in to Five tonight at 9.00pm. Followed swiftly by a repeat of The Woman With The 14-Stone Tumour.
Comments
This should be called The incredible 26 year-old boy.
I thought this was quite a good documentary actually. I'd be interested to know about other savants. Also, they talked about , where you see words as colours and things like that. It fascinates me because I see days, months and years and parts of days as colours and shades too. My friend sees numbers and letters as different colours too. In the documentary Daniel saw the number 2 as a woosh from left to right, which sounds a similar thing. I've never come across anyone else with synesthesia or similar.
In April interesting research was published in Nature about a Swiss woman who could taste music. They could speed up her recognising differences between tones by giving her the proper taste ice cream, that included tastes like mown grass, apple and cream (Bach was cream). That way she was quicker than professional musicians in tone difference recognition.
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