Moonwalking With Einstein (32 page)

171
lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered:
J. M. Deakin and S. Cobley (2003), “A Search for Deliberate Practice: An Examination of the Practice Environments in Figureskating and Volleyball,” in
Expert Performance in Sports: Advances in Research on Sport Expertise
(edited by J. L. Starkes and K. A. Ericsson).

172
trying to understand the expert’s thinking at each step:
K. A. Ericsson, et al. (1993), “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,”
Psychological Review
100 no. 3, 363-406.

172
working through old games:
N. Charness, R. Krampe, and U. Mayer (1996), “The Role of Practice and Coaching in Entrepreneurial Skill Domains: An International Comparison of Life-Span Chess Skill Acquisition,” in Ericsson,
The Road to Excellence
, pp. 51-80.

172
repeatedly flashed words 10 to 15 percent faster:
Dvorak,
Typewriting Behavior
.

173
have a tendency to get less and less accurate over the years:
C. A. Beam, E. F. Conant, and E. A. Sickles (2003), “Association of Volume and Volume-Independent Factors with Accuracy in Screening Mammogram Interpretation,”
Journal of the National Cancer Institute
95, 282-90.

174
now acquired by your average high school junior:
Ericsson,
The Road to Excellence
, p. 31.

9: THE TALENTED TENTH

192
“no sensibilities, no soul”:
Ravitch,
Left Back
, p. 21.

193
“mental discipline”:
Ravitch,
Left Back
, p. 61.

203
inventory and invention:
Carruthers,
The Craft of Thought
, p. 11.

208
a group of baseball fanatics:
G. J. Spillich (1979), “Text Processing of Domain-Related Information for Individuals with High and Low Domain Knowledge,”
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior
14, 506-22.

208
either a witch trial or a piece of correspondence:
Frederick M. Hess,
Still at Risk
pp. 1-2
.

10: THE LITTLE RAIN MAN IN ALL OF US

215
meet up with Daniel:
I e-mailed Daniel and asked if he’d be willing to meet with me. He wrote back, “I normally request a fee for interviews with the media.” After I explained to him why that would be impossible, he agreed to see me on the condition that I mention the Web site of his online tutoring company,
optimnem.co.uk.

217
its own separate syndrome:
Asperger’s occurs in about one in two hundred people, and synesthesia probably in about one in two thousand, but that may be an underestimate. Nobody knows if both conditions have ever existed in the same person before, but assuming they occur independently of each other, the laws of probability would suggest that one in 400,000 people should have both synesthesia and Asperger’s. That would be about 750 people in the United States alone.

219
legally changed in 2001:
Daniel is fully open about having changed his name. He told me he didn’t like the sound of his old family name, Corney,

221
more than nine thousand books he has read at about ten seconds a page:
It should be noted that this claim was never investigated in a peer-reviewed journal. I suspect this bit of hyperbole might not have held up to careful scrutiny.

226
it’s a skill that can be learned:
Eventually my investigation of mental mathematics led me to a remarkable book called
The Great Mental Calculators: The Psychology, Methods, and Lives of Calculating Prodigies Past and Present
by a psychologist named Steven Smith. Smith dismisses the notion that there’s anything special about the brains of calculation prodigies, and insists that their abilities derive purely from obsessive interest. He compares calculation to juggling: “Any sufficiently diligent non-handicapped person can learn to juggle, but the skill is actually acquired only by a handful of highly motivated individuals.” George Packer Bidder, one of the most renowned human calculators of all time, even went so far as to express “a strong conviction, that mental arithmetic can be taught, as easily, if not even with greater facility, than ordinary arithmetic.”

230
would have been able to do as well:
At UCSD, Ramachandran and his graduate students administered three other tests of Tammet’s synesthesia. Using Play-Doh, they asked him to create 3-D models of twenty of his number shapes. When they gave him a surprise retest twenty-four hours later, all of his shapes matched up. Then they hooked up an electrode to his fingers and flashed him the digits of pi—but with a few errant digits thrown in. They measured his galvanic skin response and noticed that it jumped dramatically when he confronted a digit that didn’t belong.

The UCSD researchers also administered the Stroop test, another assessment commonly used to verify synesthesia. First they gave Daniel three minutes to memorize a matrix of a hundred numbers. After five minutes, he was able to recall sixty-eight of those numbers, and three days later he still remembered them perfectly. Then they gave him three minutes to memorize a matrix of a hundred numbers in which the size of the numbers on the page corresponded to how Daniel described the numbers in his mind. Nines were printed larger than other numbers and sixes were printed smaller. In this case, he memorized fifty digits, and held onto all of them for three days. Finally, they gave him a test where the numbers were printed in incongruous sizes. Nines were printed small. Sixes were printed large. They wanted to see if it would throw Daniel off his game. Did it ever. Daniel was only able to remember sixteen numbers, and after three days, he could remember exactly zero of them. Ramachandran and his students put together a prepublication conference poster on Daniel titled “Does Synesthesia Contribute to Mathematical Savant Skills?” in which they refer to him by the pseudonym Arithmos. It includes a caveat: “As in all cases like this we need to consider the fact that Arithmos may be performing almost all of his ‘mental feats’ via pure memorization.”

230
they didn’t find this:
D. Bor, J. Bilington, and S. Baron-Cohen (2007), “Savant memory for digits in a case of synaesthesia and Asperger syndrome is related to hyperactivity in the lateral prefrontal cortex.”
Neurocase
13, 311-319.

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