Last night I performed with a few actors at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser reading real stories from clinic patients. One of the actors had an amazing wife and daughter. As soon as I saw her I knew she was different…the way she smiled and wittily engaged but looked away. We had fun talking and after a bit she said, “Do you have ADHD?” Ha ha! I was like, “Yes, I dooooo!” She told me she was autistic and studying psychology and she didn’t mean to call me out in a bad way. I said, no, it is great! You nailed it! She said something about herself and then “being annoying.” I said, “I reject anyone saying I am annoying! If they do, it is because they are so boring!” I didn’t want her to do that to herself. Plus, she was fucking brilliant!

Fascinating story: “For most savants, the gift arrives without explanation. They calculate enormous equations in seconds, memorize thousands of pages, play back entire concerts after hearing them once. And when researchers ask how, the answer is always some version of the same thing: it just happens. They cannot tell you what it looks like from the inside. They cannot describe what they see. The performance is real and documented and completely opaque, even to themselves. Daniel Tammet can describe it. That one difference changes everything. He was born in London on January 31, 1979 — a day he experiences as blue. He grew up quiet and unusual, the eldest of nine children in a working-class family in East London, careful and observant and entirely different on the inside from what he showed the world. He had spent years studying how other people moved through conversations, how they made eye contact, how they responded to jokes, and had learned to replicate it closely enough that no one suspected anything. He was twenty-five years old before he was diagnosed as autistic. By then, he had already been living in two worlds simultaneously for his entire life. His brain has synesthesia, a neurological condition where senses blend together. For most people who have it, the effects are faint. For Daniel, they are total. Numbers are not abstract quantities to him. They are vivid, three-dimensional shapes with colors, textures, and personalities. The number 289 is ugly, unpleasant to encounter. The number 333 is beautiful. The number 37 feels lumpy. When he does mathematics, he does not calculate. He watches shapes interact in his mind and observes the form they create together. The answer appears. He simply sees it. On March 14, 2004, he stood in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford and began reciting digits of pi. He went for five hours and eighteen minutes. He recited 22,514 digits without a single error. He was not using a memory palace or a mnemonic system in the conventional sense. He was walking through a landscape that only he could see, describing the shapes as he encountered them. Pi, for Daniel, is not a number. It is a continuous visual journey through terrain he has memorized the way someone else might memorize a long road they have driven a hundred times.