Born on a Blue Day

Title: Born on a Blue Day
Author: Daniel Tamment
Genre: Auto-biography
Pages: 284
Paged Read: 123

This is a very interesting book, which I began reading a week or so ago. I am loving it, as it gives a unique insight into an amazing mind. It's written by a man named Daniel Tammet. He has an extremely rare version of autism called Savant syndrome, or Aspergers, This means that he can do amazingly complicated mathematical expressions in his head, almost instantly. He does this by visualizing all of the number. For example one is shining bright light, or the number nine a giant blue number. He also visualizes numbers as textures. He is a very rare person though, because even though he has this form of autism he can still socialize and he is not completely sucked into his own bubble. He does find it hard to make friends, but he does make one, later on. A Pakistani boy. They both share a love for maths and numbers, and they bond very well. Daniel was the child of a factory worker and his wife and ever since an early age, they knew he was different. He would bang his head on the wall and cry frequently. When he was at nursery he would never have any friends. His only friends where numbers. He was obsessed with hoarding. He would have piles of books, coins and conkers in his room, much to his parent's annoyance. When he grew up a bit more, he would sit in his room and read maths workbooks, solving all the problems easily and instantly. Before he made any friends, he would have an elderly woman in his imagination who he could talk to about everything. The main reason why he didn't make any friends was, not because he was strange, or always stared at his feet but a slightly different reason. Whenever he tries to talk to people, he talks about everything he can think about, and doesn't let them speak. If they cut him off, he says that he feels as though he can't breath. This is the post on the first half of the book and I'll finish it over next week and then tell you about it. I only mentioned the most important ideas in this post, because the book is a little hard to follow, and sometimes he talks for ages about one particular thing. If I where to compare this book to another, I would not be able to find a book, but the film "Rain Man", would be one I highly recommend and is about a man, who has a similar story to this one.