Moonwalking With Einstein (26 page)

If the rest of us could turn off that top-level processing, would we become savants? There actually is a technology that can selectively, and temporarily, turn off parts of the brain. It’s called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, and it works by using focused magnetic fields to wreak havoc on the electrical firing of targeted neurons. The deadening effect can last for upwards of an hour. Although TMS is relatively new, it has been used successfully as a noninvasive means of treating problems as diverse as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and migraines. But in many ways, TMS’s experimental potential is even more exciting than its therapeutic uses. There are obviously some intractable ethical problems with experimenting on the human brain. Since you can’t go in and mess around with a living brain (HM taught us that), much of what neuroscientists have been able to learn about the brain has been the result of a few “natural experiments” caused by extremely unlikely forms of brain damage (like EP’s). Because TMS allows neuroscientists to turn regions of the brain on and off at will, they can use it to perform repeatable experiments without waiting for someone to walk into their office with a rare lesion that just happens to affect the specific part of the brain they want to study. Allan Snyder, an Australian neuroscientist who popularized TMS as an experimental tool, uses the technique to temporarily induce savantlike artistic skills in otherwise normal people by targeting the left frontotemporal lobe (the same region that is often damaged in savants). After having the left temporal lobe zapped, subjects can draw more accurate pictures from memory, and can more quickly estimate the number of dots flashed on a screen. Snyder calls his device a “creativity-amplifying machine.” He might as well call it the savant cap.

In the
Brainman
documentary
, I had watched Daniel divide 13 by 97 and give the result to so many decimal places that the answer ran off the edge of a scientific calculator. A computer had to be brought in for verification. He multiplied three-digit numbers in his head in a few seconds, and quickly figured out that 37 to the fourth power was 1,874,161. To me, Daniel’s mental math seemed much more impressive than his memory.

As I began looking into the complicated subject of mental math, I learned that just like mnemonics, the field has its own vast literature, and even its own world championship. Indeed, with a bit of Googling and a whole lot of practice, anyone can teach themselves how to multiply three-digit numbers in their head. It is by no means easy—believe me, I tried—but it’s a skill that can be learned.

Though I asked him repeatedly on several occasions, Daniel refused to perform even a single mental calculation for me. “One of my parents’ big fears was that I would become a freak show,” he said when I pressed him. “I had to promise them that I wouldn’t do calculations for people who ask me. I only do them for scientists.” But he did perform some mental math for the cameras in
Brainman
.

As he was performing those calculations, I was struck by something odd that Daniel seemed to be doing with his fingers. While he’s supposedly watching the answer crystallize in his mind’s eye, the camera captures his index finger sliding around on the surface of the desk in front of him. Given his descriptions of shapes melting and fusing in his mind, that little bit of finger work just struck me as strange.

Talking to a few experts, I learned that anyone who has done mental multiplication might have suspicions about those sliding fingers. One of the most common techniques for calculating the product of two large numbers is known as cross multiplication. It involves doing a sequence of individual multiplications of single-digit numbers and then combining them together in the end. To my eye, this appeared to be what Daniel may have been doing on the table. Daniel denies this. He says it’s just a fidget that helps him concentrate.

“There are a lot of people in the world who can do those kinds of things, but they’re still pretty impressive,” Ben Pridmore told me. In addition to competing on the memory circuit, Ben also competes in the Mental Calculation World Cup, a biennial contest in which participants carry out mental calculations far more extreme than Daniel’s, including multiplying eight-digit numbers without pencil or paper. None of these top calculators make any claims about seeing numerical shapes that fuse and divide in their minds’ eyes. They all readily admit to using techniques detailed in countless books and Web sites. I asked Ronald Doerfler, author of one of those books,
Dead Reckoning: Calculating Without Instruments,
to watch
Brainman
and tell me what he thought. “I’m not fantastically impressed with any of that,” he said of Daniel’s mathematical talents, and added, “The lore of mental calculators is rife with misdirection.”

What about the fact that Daniel knows all the prime numbers less than 10,000? Even this doesn’t impress Ben Pridmore. “Just basic memorization,” he says. There are only 1,229 primes less than 10,000. That’s a lot of numbers to commit to memory, but not compared to learning 22,000 digits of pi.

Calendar calculating, the only savant skill Daniel was willing to perform in front of me, turns out to be so simple that it really shouldn’t impress anyone. Savants like Kim, who can tell you the date of every Easter in the last thousand years, seem to have internalized the rhythms and rules of the calendar without explicitly understanding them. But anyone can learn them. There are several very simple calendar calculation formulas, published widely on the Internet. It only takes about an hour of practice to become fluent with them.

The more Daniel and I talked, the more his own statements began to cast doubt on his story. When I asked him on different occasions two weeks apart to describe what the number 9,412 looked like, he gave me two completely different answers. The first time he said, “There’s blue in there because it starts with a nine, and a drifting motion as well, and kind of like a sloping as well.” Two weeks later, he said after a long pause, “It’s a spotty number. There’s spots and curves as well. It’s actually a very complex number.” Then he added, “The larger the numbers are, the harder they are to put into words. That’s why in interviews, I usually concentrate on the smaller numbers.” Indeed, synesthetes are never entirely consistent, and to his credit, Daniel described several smaller numbers consistently over the course of our meetings.

But what about those “Mindpower and Advanced Memory skills” courses that Daniel used to advertise on the WWBC? Back at his home in Kent, I handed him a printout of his ad from 2001 and asked him what I was supposed to make of it. If his extraordinary memory came to him entirely without effort and he didn’t need to use mnemonic techniques, why was he selling a course on exactly that subject? He uncurled his feet from under him and put them back on the floor. “Look, I was twenty-two at the time,” he said. “I had no money. The one thing I had experience in was competing in the World Memory Championship. So I wrote a course on improving your memory. When I went to the world championship, I found out that the people taught themselves to remember. None of them had good memories. I thought at the time that they were lying, but it did give me the idea that this was something you could teach. I was in a position where I had to sell myself. The only thing I thought was sellable was my brain. So I used Tony Buzan kind of stuff. I said, ‘Expand your brain,’ and that sort of thing, but I didn’t like doing it.”

“You don’t use memory techniques?” I asked him.

“No,” he assured me.

If Daniel had concocted his story of being a natural savant, it would have required a degree of mendacity that I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe he possessed. If he was merely a trained mnemonist trying to cloak himself in the garb of a savant, why would he so willingly subject himself to scientific testing?

How could one ever know whether Daniel is what he claims to be? For a long time, scientists were skeptical that synesthesia even existed. They dismissed the phenomenon as fakery, or nothing more than lasting associations made between numbers and colors in childhood. Despite all the case reports in the literature, there was no way of proving that something so seemingly far-fetched was actually taking place in someone’s brain. In 1987, Baron-Cohen developed the Test of Genuineness for Synesthesia, the first rigorous assessment of the condition. The test measures the consistency with which a purported synesthete reports color-word associations over time. When Baron-Cohen administered a version of this test to Daniel, he passed it with ease. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if any trained mnemonist would have been able to do as well. Other results from Daniel’s scientific testing struck me as odd. When Baron-Cohen tested Daniel’s memory for faces, he performed abysmally, leading Baron-Cohen to conclude that “his face memory appears impaired.” That sounds like just the sort of thing a savant might be bad at. And yet when Daniel Corney competed in the World Memory Championship, he won the gold medal in the names-and-faces event. It just didn’t make sense.

One test that might help demonstrate Daniel’s synesthesia more conclusively would be an fMRI scan. In many number-color synesthetes, you can actually see brain areas associated with color processing light up when the subject is asked to read a number. When Baron-Cohen teamed up with fMRI experts to look at Daniel’s brain, they didn’t find this. Their test subject “did not activate extra-striate regions normally associated with synaesthesia suggesting that he has an unusual and more abstract and conceptual form of synaesthesia,” the researchers concluded. Were it not for the fact that he’d passed the Test of Genuineness for Synesthesia, another reasonable conclusion might be that Daniel is not a synesthete at all.

“Sometimes people ask me if I mind being a guinea pig for the scientists. I have no problem with it because I know that I am helping them to understand the human brain better, which is something that will benefit everyone,” Daniel writes in his memoir. “It is also gratifying for me to learn more about myself, and the way in which my mind works.” When Anders Ericsson invited Daniel to visit FSU to be tested according to his own exacting standards, Daniel said he was too busy to make the trip.

The problem with all the tests given to Daniel is their null hypothesis—the working assumption that would be true if their alternative hypothesis were proven false: namely, that if Daniel wasn’t a savant, then he must be just a regular guy. But what needs to be tested, especially in light of his unusual personal history, is the alternative possibility that the world’s most famous savant might actually be a trained mnemonist.

About a year after
my first meeting with Daniel, his publicist e-mailed me to ask if I wanted to meet with him again, this time over breakfast at the stylish midtown hotel he was staying at in New York. He was in town to do an appearance on
Good Morning America
and to promote his book,
Born on a Blue Day
, which had debuted in America in third place on the
New York Times
nonfiction bestseller list.

After a cup of coffee and some pleasant chitchat about his life in the spotlight, I asked him again—for the third time—what the number 9,412 looked like to him. There was a flicker of recognition in his eyes before he closed them. He knew I hadn’t pulled those digits out of thin air. He put his fingers in his ears, and held them there for two very long, uncomfortable minutes of silence. “I can see it in my head. But I can’t break it down,” he said, finally.

“Last time I asked, you were able to describe it almost immediately.”

He thought about it a bit longer. “It would be dark blue, and it would be pointy, and shiny, with a drifting motion. Or I could picture it as ninety-four and twelve, in which case it would look like a triangle and this sort of shape.” He made a kind of quadrilateral with his arms. His face was cherry red. “It depends on all sorts of things, like whether I heard the number OK, and how I decided to break it up. It depends on whether I’m tired. I make mistakes sometimes. I see the wrong number. I mistake it for a number that looks similar. That’s why I prefer to do tests with actual scientists. There isn’t the same stress.”

I read back to him the descriptions he’d given me of 9,412 the last two times I’d seen him. They could hardly have been more different. I told him my theory, which I realized would be very difficult to prove: that he was using the same basic techniques as other mental athletes, and that he invented these far-out synesthetic descriptions of numbers to mask the fact that he had memorized a simple image to associate with each of the two-digit combinations from 00 to 99—one of the most basic techniques in the mnemonist’s tool kit. It was one of the most uncomfortable sentences I’d ever spoken to anyone.

For some time, I agonized over whether to include Daniel in this book. But late one night, not long before I was supposed to turn in a draft of this chapter, I decided to do one last Internet search for his name—just to see if I might have missed something, or at least to refresh my memory about a story that had been sitting in a folder in my filing cabinet for over a year. Somehow—and I don’t know how I missed this before—I found a cached version of
danieltammet.com, a Web site created in 2000 that hadn’t been online for at least three or four years. The seven-year-old “About” page describing Daniel included a surprisingly forthright bit of autobiography that didn’t make it into
Born on a Blue Day
: