Wishtank

His range of expertise is — believe it or not — quite vast. As his father Fran describes in his book, “The Real Rainmain:”

“Kim is not behaviorally autistic. He has a warm, loving personality. He truly cares for people and enjoys sharing his unique skills and knowledge capacity. Known as ‘Kimputer’ to many, his knowledge-library includes World and American History, People and Leaders, Geography (roads and highways in U.S. and Canada), Professional Sports (baseball, basketball, football, Kentucky Derby winners etc), the Space Program, Movies and movie themes, Actors and Actresses, the Bible, Mormon Church Doctrine and History, Calendar Calculations (including a person’s day of birth, present year’s birthday, and the year and the date the person will turn 65 years old so he or she can retire), Literature/Authors, Shakespeare, Telephone Area Codes, major ZIP Codes, all TV stations and their markets. He can identify most classical music compositions and tell the date the music was written and the composer’s birth date and place of birth and death… He also keeps current on world, U.S. and most local events by reading newspapers, magazines and by listening to the media. He reads constantly. He can also describe the highways that go to a person’s small town, the county, area code and ZIP code, television stations available in the town, who the person’s pay their telephone bill to, and describe any historical events that may have occurred in their area. His expertise includes at least 14 subject areas.”

This being said, it is reasonable to believe that Peek’s mind, as far as we know, is quantitatively greater than any human on Earth — Daniel Tammet included. But when it comes to qualitative analysis, he and Tammet are just different.

Daniel Tammet >>

The most distinct difference, between Tammet and Peek (and Tammet and every other developmentally impaired savant) is Tammet’s adaption, over time, to normal social behavior. It wasn’t always like this for him, and it took a great deal of effort. Today, Daniel has mastered his behavioral and motor skills to the point where his autism, epilepsy, synaesthesia and Asperger Syndrome are not even detectable under typical social conditions. The video below of his appearance on David Letterman, is evidence of this. He is capable of communicating clearly (in more than 11 languages, for that matter) in a form that is socially sound.

There are many other differences between these two men though, and for the sake of being concise, I’ll let Dr. Treffert describe a few:

“Both Kim and Daniel have massive memory capacity quantitatively, but the nature of that massive memory differs somewhat qualitatively. Kim has a huge store of factual material, but disqualifies himself a bit when it comes to math simply saying that is not an area of interest or strength for him. Daniel’s strength, on the other hand, is not in factual storage, but rather the ability to faithfully recall huge strings of numbers (or other items) which he literally ‘sees’ before him as if on a tapestry of images, and in his ability to manipulate those numbers with incredible speed in various calculations and derivations. Both Kim and Daniel, however, are continually flooded with data within their areas of interest and expertise, vacuuming up such data instantly, and massively, storing it for later retrieval with incredible speed and seemingly bottomless depth.”

To be balanced, I think it’s only fair to exemplify a couple of Tammet’s incredible feats. Due (or thanks) to his synaesthesia, he recognizes and interprets numbers much differently than ordinary human beings. Daniel sees each integer between 1 and 10,000 as a unique form, with its own composition of shape, color, texture and motion. When it comes time to perform calculations, he sees a distinct landscape composed of the appropriate combination of these unique forms. He is able to provide solutions by translating the image that appears in his mind back into numbers that the rest of us can understand — and he does this with very little conscious effort. In the videos below, you can see him provide the correct answers to a number of arithmetic problems (ones that most of the population wouldn’t be able to approach without a calculator) from the top of his head, in less than a few seconds — e.g. 37 to the 4th power.

Diagram from Tammet’s memoir (see media gallery below)

In 2004, for instance, Daniel recited the mathematical constant pi beyond 22,500 decimal places, entirely from memory, in about five hours. He did this as part of a fundraiser for the National Society for Epilepsy, and those monitoring the event verified that his recital was flawless. Tammet sees Pi as a beautiful number, and has painted a watercolor to show people what it looks like — I’ll purposely leave off the modifying phrase “to him,” as nobody knows what Pi looks like better than Daniel.

A second amazing feat, was his mastering of the Icelandic language in just 7 days, then being interviewed on Icelandic television. He was able to communicate in the language comfortably and, from all accounts, quite adequately (see video of this below). Aside from Icelandic, he speaks more than 10 languages, including his native English, French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Estonian, Welsh and Esperanto. I say more than 10 because he is also creating his own language, known as Mänti, that has features of both Finnish and Estonian (his fondest language).

So, there you have it — two very advanced, but different minds. Kim Peek is currently quantitatively greater than Daniel Tammet. Pondering on Peek’s statement concerning Tammet’s potential, it somehow holds more credibility than your typical forecast or prediction. I trust that if anyone can predict Tammet’s future ability, it is Kim Peek.

Tammet’s ability to explain to the scientific community how his prodigious mind works is a gift that this world has never seen. Just shy of his 30th birthday (coming up on the last day of January), there is no telling how much Tammet will learn in his life, or how much he will teach us about the nature of learning itself.

“Someday you will be as great as I am.” >> Kim Peek

“That was a wonderful compliment, what an aspiration to have.”
>>Daniel Tammet

:: Media Gallery ::

ˆ Kim Peek: The Real Rainman

ˆ Daniel Tammet on David Letterman

ˆ Daniel Tammet: The boy with the incredible brain (part 1 of 5)

ˆ Daniel Tammet: The boy with the incredible brain (part 2 of 5)

ˆ Daniel Tammet: The boy with the incredible brain (part 3 of 5)

ˆ Daniel Tammet: The boy with the incredible brain (part 4 of 5)

ˆ Daniel Tammet: The boy with the incredible brain (part 5 of 5)

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