Friday, March 29, 2024
Youth Central Logo

YOUTH ARE AWESOME

Youth Are Awesome, commonly referred to as YAA, is a blog written by youth for youth. YAA provides the youth of Calgary a place to amplify their voices and perspectives on what is happening around them. Youth Are Awesome is a program of Youth Central.

Any views or opinions expressed on this blog belong solely to the author and do not represent those of people or organizations that the blog may be associated with, unless explicitly stated. All content is for informational purposes only.

HomeUncategorizedDaniel Tammet: the man who sees numbers

Daniel Tammet: the man who sees numbers

Born in East London, England, Daniel Tammet was the oldest of nine children in his family. Growing up, Tammet had always been a little different. Instead of playing with the other kids on the playground, he would observe the numbers on the hopscotch squares and marvel at the patterns made by the spiraling leaves on trees.

Then, at the age of four, it was discovered that Daniel could do massive calculations in his head at astonishing speeds. While this may not seem like that extraordinary of feat because fast mental calculations can be taught and enhanced with practice, it is how Daniel does it that makes him extraordinary. You see, Daniel has a condition that scientists call synaesthesia, a neurological aberration in which stimulation in one sensory cortex also leads to stimulation in another sense or cognitive pathway. Thus, in Daniel’s case, he claims to “see” numbers in his head. For him, each number up to 10,000 has a unique shape, colour, size and texture. He describes 289 as a particularly ugly number, 25 as the kind of number you would invite to a party, six as a small nothingness, nine as a towering, intimidating number and pi as simply beautiful.

As a result, unlike the rest of us when we struggle to do mental math calculations in our heads, Daniel doesn’t need to consciously make an effort to solve math equations. For example, when asked to multiply two different numbers together, he describes the experience as seeing two separate entities in his synaesthetic landscape, the answer in the form of a separate entity that emerges as a bridge in between the previous two. Then, based on this new “landscape” of information, Daniel can interpret it to come up with the correct answer.

And this isn’t even the full extent of Tammet’s abilities. Watch the documentary on YouTube (click here) to learn about how he memorized over 20,000 digits of pi, gambled using his intuition in Las Vegas, and learned Icelandic in a mere seven days!

Juliet
Juliet
No, I'm not a Shakespeare character reincarnate. You see, when I was five, my parents gave me a random book of names and I arbitrarily flipped to a page and chose the first one I saw. I like wearing sweatpants on test days, falling asleep to the Wailin' Jennys, and eating ice cream on a cold day. I've made cheesecake, croissants, and pies from scratch, and I hate it when I don't live up to my own expectations. As for potential Romeos...the only one that I've met in my 17 years of existence was a Yorkshire Terrier.
RELATED ARTICLES

1 COMMENT

Comments are closed.

Most Popular