If he can do it, how about you?

Have you ever seen the movie Rain Man?  Talk about an eye opener!  It’s about a guy who’s autistic savant, which basically means that some things that we would call simple are hard for him (the autistic part), and some things that we call hard are a breeze for him (the savant part).  That doesn’t sound like much, but when you see what he can do, it’s incredible.

So what does that have to do with you?  Amazingly enough, we basically all have the same brains.  Which means that all the stuff that a savant can do we have the capacity to do, too.  Somehow.  How to tap into that resource is the real question.

Meet Daniel Tammet.  He’s a real autistic savant, not just a character in a movie.  He can calculate amazingly huge sums in his head and recognize just about any prime number, no matter how big.  But he doesn’t exactly get how emotions work, and asking him to tell his right from left is a challenge.  Go figure.

If you ask Daniel to describe how he does what he does, he’ll give you some out-of-this-world answers.  For example, he doesn’t just see numbers, he experiences them.  For him they have colour, texture and motion.  Maybe even sound or feeling.   He says 37 is lumpy like porridge, and 89 is kind of like falling snow.  Cool, huh?

What would it be like if we could learn to be like that?  How incredible would our lives be?  We could do both the simple and the complex.  We could experience things like no one before us has.

Hmm…  It’s definitely something to think about.

If you’d like to find out a bit more about this outstanding brain ability firsthand, meet Daniel and let him give you a peek into his wild world.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbASOcqc1Ss

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