Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

Daniel Tammet

Jan 2007 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

A journey into one of the most fascinating minds alive today—guided by the owner himself.

Bestselling author Daniel Tammet (Thinking in Numbers) is virtually unique among people who have severe autistic disorders in that he is capable of living a fully independent life and able to explain what is happening inside his head.

He sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures, and he can perform extraordinary calculations in his head. He can learn to speak new languages fluently, from scratch, in a week. In 2004, he memorized and recited more than 22,000 digits of pi, setting a record. He has savant syndrome, an extremely rare condition that gives him the most unimaginable mental powers, much like those portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man.

Fascinating and inspiring, Born on a Blue Day explores what it’s like to be special and gives us an insight into what makes us all human—our minds.

Ratings and reviews

I thought this was a fantastic book and something that every teacher should read to help them better understand all of the students in their classroom. I am a first year teacher and I know that autisim is a growing problem in the world around us. This helped me to better understand some of my students that have this as well as reminding me that all students learn in different ways and we have to remember that even on those days when we want to take the easy way out because we are just that tired.

Amazing book. Mind blowing to read about how he visualizes numbers!

I'd surely recommend this book to my friends.

About the author

Daniel Tammet is a writer, linguist, and educator. A 2007 poll of 4,000 Britons named him as one of the world's "100 living geniuses." His last book, the New York Times bestseller Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, has been translated into 18 languages. He lives in Avignon, France.