Daniel Tammet
Daniel Tammet
Daniel Tammet FRSAis an English writer, essayist, translator, and autistic savant. His 2006 memoir, Born on a Blue Day, about his life with Asperger syndrome and savant syndrome, was named a "Best Book for Young Adults" in 2008 by the American Library Association Young Adult Library Services magazine. His second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France's best-selling books of 2009. Thinking in Numbers, his third book, was published on 16 August 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton in...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionYoung Adult Author
Date of Birth31 January 1979
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Reading and discovering fiction has taught me how to empathise, understand falling in love and all those complex relationships that people have to deal with.
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I've got a quiet voice. I think it's because as a child I didn't speak very much. I used to put my fingers in my ears to feel the silence, which was like a lovely trickling motion in my head.
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I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his 'Raindrop Prelude.'
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No relationship is without its difficulties and this is certainly true when one or both of the persons involved has an autistic spectrum disorder. Even so, I believe what is truly essential to the success of any relationship is not so much compatibility, but love. When you love someone, virtually anything is possible.
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If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination is what makes a subject come alive.
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Our thoughts and our feelings, of course, are not wholly objective, they're inherently subjective. And that's the danger, and I think as long as we're aware of it and can push back against it, I don't think that these two views are necessarily incompatible.
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I was incredibly lucky that my first book found a large and loyal readership. It changed my life - from being a very withdrawn adult to living in Paris as a full-time writer. It has also given me enormous confidence.
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I think if I ever stopped pushing myself, I would revert quickly to quite repetitive, restrictive behaviour. But in pushing myself and concentrating on what I can do, I think I can contribute to society. And that gives me the desire to keep pushing, to see what I'm capable of. The thing to do is not to stop.
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I found maths very easy, but I still enjoyed discovering things. You have to have the necessary information. For example, what's the difference between the mean and the median? Probability fascinated me. You have to think very carefully about things, which is the way my mind works anyway.
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Retaining a sense of control is really important. I like to do things in my own time, and in my own style, so an office with targets and bureaucracy just wouldn't work.
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One of the lines from my books is about having respect for different minds, and if I had to have an epitaph at this point in my life, that would be it.
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My first memory - at about four - was of numbers. The doctors who study me think a combination of mild autism and seizures I had when I was three have made me experience numbers the way I do.
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My family supported me. I wasn't hot-housed at all as a young child; I didn't go to any kind of gifted school. They didn't exist in the very poor parts of England when I grew up in the 1980s. I had a great time to learn, had access to libraries and teachers who were patient and enthusiastic when I showed ability in some subjects.
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When things don't come so naturally to you, you want to persevere, you want to keep pushing yourself to overcome obstacles that prevent you from having the kind of life that you want to have.