A few weeks ago, friends began asking me if I had seen Brainman series on the Science channel. The show featured disabled people with prodigy-like skills. Rainman and all that. No, I had missed it.
On Thursday, there was an unlikely article in the Home and Garden section about one of the men featured in the Brainman series, Daniel Tammet. The article didn't talk too much about Daniel's house, instead it mostly described his gifts and disabilities:
He wears his gifts lightly, casually. When he gets nervous, he said, he sometimes reverts to a coping strategy he employed as a child: he multiplies two over and over again, each result emitting in his head bright silvery sparks until he is enveloped by fireworks of them. He demonstrated, reciting the numbers to himself, and in a moment had reached 1,048,576 — 2 to the 20th power. He speaks 10 languages, including Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto, and has invented his own language, Mantï. In 2004, he raised money for an epilepsy charity by memorizing and publicly reciting the number pi to 22,514 digits — a new European record. In addition to Asperger’s, he has the rare gift of synesthesia, which allows him to see numbers as having shapes, colors and textures; he also assigns them personalities. His unusual mind has been studied repeatedly by researchers in Britain and the United States.
I was intrigued enough to go out a buy his new book,
Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
Daniel seems like a sweet guy, who has worked hard to find the happiness that many of us take for granted. However, I have major problems with the freak show that he's been put on in the past couple of years. Smart people shouldn't be exhibited like circus freaks. There's some distasteful about taking a guy who is easily led and putting him up on a stage to recite numbers. The purpose of the spectacle is get people to marvel at this man's weirdness. Feels like exploitation to me.
Daniel's story about his youth was fascinating. He was one of nine kids in a working class British family. He credits his brothers and sisters with keeping him from collapsing inside himself. Also, despite his obvious disabilities, he wasn't put in a special education class and didn't receive therapy. This amused me, because it fits in well with my latest theory -- being surrounded by lots of noisy kids is much better for kids with disabilities than some of the snake oil they are peddling in the therapy circles.
For my readers with kids on the spectrum, here's another article.