Daniel Tammet: the Boy with the Incredible Story

By Lili Marlene

Expanded 2017 edition. Many people have known for a long time that the life story of the author, celebrity and performer of intellectual feats Daniel Tammet which has been told countless times in books, television and journal papers is incomplete in ways that matter and questionable in too many ways to count. Let Lili Marlene take you by the hand and show you the alternative story hiding in plain sight. Learn about the surprising role of the PR industry in neuroscience and psychology. With her meticulous eye for detail Lili reviews the scientific literature, popular media, journalistic coverage and statistical data pertinent to Daniel Tammet (previously named Daniel Corney). Is Daniel Tammet a trained memory sportsman and showman, or a natural savant? Is he impaired in his ability to read and recognize faces, as claimed? Is Tammet's "diagnosis" of synaesthesia beyond question? In the years since the first edition other personalities have emerged telling life stories of mysterious savant talents such as memorization, music and visual art, stories that appear to be modeled on Tammet's. Lili has added pen portraits of new "savants" on the scene and the academics and "experts" who have nurtured their fame. Grab some popcorn because a big story just keeps getting bigger!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lili Marlene
• Release date: Feb 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301533084

Lili Marlene

Lili Marlene is not my real name. I live in Australia. I'm an educated person and I've studied psychology at university. I've also worked in a variety of occupations but by far my most important and interesting job to date has been as a mother. I enjoy many different types of synaesthesia. There are few people whose company I enjoy more than my own, and I've been a loner for as long as I can remember.

Book preview

My interest in the subject of the lesser-known aspects of the life of Daniel Tammet was sparked, informed and supported by knowledgeable commenters at my blog, some anonymous. I thank them all but one who uses the name Tomas deserves the greatest part of my gratitude for his kind and intellectually stimulating online company and crucial information. Thank you Tomas, whoever you are!

I would like to acknowledge Joshua Foer, author of the book Moonwalking with Einstein, as the person who has done the most to publicise the unacknowledged side of Daniel Tammet’s biography.

I would like to thank the people at Smashwords for making this ebook and countless other ebooks possible. The world of publishing and books will never be the same again.

I would like to thank Google Blogger for making my blog Incorrect Pleasures possible, and for making it so easy to translate foreign-language sources for the research that I have done on this book. I never dreamt such clever feats would be possible in my youth.

I would like to thank the people at Internet Archive Wayback Machine, who provide a unique and essential service of archiving web pages. This free and open online archive has made it possible for me and anyone on the internet to view and date long-defunct web pages, which can include historical and biographical information that is no longer available anywhere else.

I would like to thank the people of the United States of America, who have a wonderful first amendment of their constitution which I believe guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The constitution of Australia, the country where I live, does not explicitly protect freedom of speech or expression. This is probably the reason why my words are published in the USA and not in Australia.

Introduction

Many people have known for a long time that the story of the life of the author, celebrity and performer of intellectual feats Daniel Tammet which has been retold many times by mass media and scientific publications is incomplete in ways that matter and questionable in too many ways to count. Evidence pointing towards a more complete account of Tammet’s life has always been available to anyone who has access to the internet, and much of this evidence consists of words written by the man himself. In his first book, an autobiography, Tammet revealed many things about himself that contradict or at least sit oddly next to some of the inflated claims about his supposed savant abilities and autistic disabilities that have been repeated countless times by university researchers and journalists. If professors and reporters can’t be bothered to sit and read cover-to-cover an autobiography by the man they intend to report on, is the subject of their scrutiny to blame for the shortcomings of their investigations? An alternative Tammet biography has always been known and accessible, but has been obscured by the size and the dominance of the expertly-promoted commercial version of Tammet’s life story. In this book I aspire to show readers where to look to find the many elements of the alternative narrative of Tammet’s biography. In the spirit of scientific journalism, and idea championed by the Australian Wikileaks founder and whistleblower Julian Assange, in one very large section of this book I present the reader with a collection of sources of information about Tammet, and I invite the reader to check out these documents and media items for themselves using the internet and draw their own conclusions. I have attempted to convey a sense of the impact that Tammet has made on neuroscience and popular culture at a global level by creating a fairly comprehensive list of published and broadcasted items about or by Tammet or that refer to Tammet (in English and other languages). Despite the many good reasons to regard Tammet with scepticism, Tammet and his books have been given positive, often rapturous coverage in some of the world’s most prestigious newspapers and science magazines and he has appeared on some of the world’s top rating television shows. Practicing doctors have recommended his first book to other doctors as a depiction of autism. Tammet’s life and mind have been the focus of a number of unskeptical research study papers published in peer-reviewed neuroscience journals. As a case study Tammet has been cited as evidence or an interesting case in countless neuro-psychology books and journal papers, even in a psychology textbook. He has also been mentioned without scepticism in a textbook for journalism students published by the Oxford University Press. Tammet’s first book has even been found amon g the belongings of one of America’s most despised and pitied mass murderers.

To mark out the items in the large list of items about Tammet that are more significant or interesting I have written the titles of these items in bold lettering. It is up to the reader whether she or he should approach my list selectively or as a whole, or skip it altogether and read only the regular text content of this book. I would recommend that the reader at least look at the earliest items in the list, including the YouTube video clips of a youthful Daniel Corney. This is your copy of this book, so read it any way you like, just don’t get lost.

Unlike the cliché, the full truth about Daniel Tammet is not stranger than fiction, but it is truly more interesting and instructive. There are many important lessons that we could learn from looking at the story behind the headlines, and many intriguing questions are raised. There is a disturbing lesson to be learned about the pervasiveness of low journalistic standards. There’s an even more concerning lesson to be discovered here about the yawning chasm between theoretical models of how medical and psychological science is believed to work and how it actually works. Science is most certainly not a perfect system or a closed system. It is run by individual researchers who have human flaws and interests beyond academia, science and a quest for pure scientific knowledge. Many of the researchers who have studied Tammet are specialists in areas of neuropsychology such as synaesthesia, autism and savant syndrome who are as much popularizers of science as scientists.

Your attitude towards Daniel Tammet might take some negative turns while reading this book, but I am sure you will find that the person discovered amongst these words is much more of a human being than the oddity that has been presented to the public by journalists, agents, publishers and a collection of neuroscience researchers.

Epigraph

"…don’t write crap, can’t be that hard, um, and, uh, when you have written complete crap, then I think you should, ah, I think you should correct it…."

- Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia from 2010 to 2013

The Incredible Story

Within these quotes we can find the basic elements of the incredible, amazing and astounding story that has been told by Daniel Tammet in his books and interviews, by university researchers and professors, by journalists working for some of the world’s most popular and respected newspapers and current affairs television programs, by French and English-speaking magazine writers and by journalists working for influential government-funded news services.

My parents had nine children and very little income…

- from an article published in The Sunday Times in 2006

The 23 year-old can memorize 1500 decimal numbers in an hour and calculate large sums in just seconds….It was only after he had an epileptic seizure at the age of three that he started to see numbers in a vastly sharper light.

- from a summary of a 2002 interview on Australian breakfast radio (ABC Radio National)

As an infant he cried incessantly, as a young child he hardly spoke.

- from an article published in The Times in 2009

Numbers are my friends and they are always around me.

- from the autobiography Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet, first published in 2006

His social difficulties were evident across his development. For example, he had no friends at school and instead counted leaves in the playground.

- from a journal paper about Daniel Tammet published in 2007 in the Journal of Consciousness Studies

I always completed all my sums well ahead of the other children in the class. Over time, I had progressed, literally, textbooks ahead of everyone else.

- from chapter 4 of Born on a Blue Day

His father was a factory worker who battled with schizophrenia for much of his adult life.

- from an article published in The Times in 2009

When someone is speaking to me it often feels like I’m trying to tune into a particular radio station and a lot of what is said just passes in and out of my head like static.

- from chapter 5 of Born on a Blue Day

Daniel Tammet hears other people's voices as radio static, and he sees numbers as shapes with texture and color. His memories play like symphonies.

- from the page about Daniel Tammet at the Lavin speakers’ agency, copyright 2012

I had to teach myself how to look and how to walk, he said, how to move myself, how to coordinate myself without falling over, without looking down, without getting absorbed in my own self, my own world.

- from a report broadcast on ABC News World News Tonight in 2005 (American television)

….he went to teach in Lithuania, and he worked as a volunteer. Because I was there of my own free will, I was given a lot of leeway.

- from an article published in The Guardian in 2005

Tammet, 26, is a phenomenon. He has done lots of amazing things -- like learning Icelandic, one of the world's most difficult languages, in just seven days.

- from a report broadcast on ABC News World News Tonight in 2005

Tammet is able to learn languages within days, to carry out complex arithmetic with the speed of a calculator, to recite pi from memory to 22,514 decimal places (the European record).

- from a 2007 book review in the Times Literary Supplement

DT speaks 10 languages, including Estonian and Finnish, has invented his own language (Manti) and learnt Spanish in one weekend. He performs mathematical calculations at lightning speed, including multiplying six-digit numbers together.

- from a journal paper about Daniel Tammet published in 2007 in the Journal of Consciousness Studies

It's a Thursday in Hamburg's Hotel Wedina, and 30-year-old Tammet has four more days. By Monday, he plans to have learned enough German -- after only a week's training -- to appear on the German television talk show Beckmann and speak fluently about brain research, autism and his new book.

- from a 2009 article in Spiegel Online

Outre cette passion pour les maths, il se passionne pour les langues étrangères. Aujourd'hui, il en parle 12 couramment (anglais, néerlandais, allemand, espagnol, espéranto - la langue internationale -, estonien, finnois, français, gallois, lituanien, roumais et islandais).

Translation:

Besides his passion for math, he has a passion for foreign languages. He speaks fluent 12 (English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Esperanto - the international language - Estonian, Finnish, French, Welsh, Lithuanian, Icelandic and roumais).

- from notes at the website of a French radio station about a May 2013 radio interview with Tammet

Here, he's trying to set a new record for reciting the number Pi to a staggering 22,500 decimal places….. Finally, after an exhausting five hours, he's finished — without a single mistake.

- from a report on Australian 60 Minutes, broadcast in 2007

A man from Kent has set a new British and European record by reciting the mathematical expression pi to more than 22,000 decimal places.

- from a 2004 BBC News report

On 14 March 2004, Daniel Tammet recited Pi to 22,514 decimal places, breaking the European record for memorising the unending number. Mr Tammet's 5-hour feat of memory was hosted by the Museum of the History of Science. Mr Tammet, who runs a training company, developed his phenomenal recall after suffering an epileptic seizure at the age of three – astounding scientists, because epilepsy normally leads to memory loss.

- from the website of the University of Oxford, last updated March 17th 2008

Few people on the streets have recognised Tammet since his pi record attempt. But, when a documentary about his life is broadcast on Channel 5 later this year, all that will change. The highlight of filming was to meet Kim Peek, the real-life character who inspired the film Rain Man….. Getting to meet the real-life Rain Man was inspirational.

- from an article published in The Guardian in 2005

Mr Tammet, who also speaks several languages, is recognised as a savant - one of a small group of people capable of extraordinary mental feats linked to a medical condition. US expert Dr Darold Treffert has listed just 25 savants in the world.

- from a 2004 BBC News report

Daniel is reluctant to show off, but tell him your birth date and effortlessly he can tell you what day of the week you were born. Tell me if you won't, but will you calculate my birthday?

- Tara Brown in a 2007 report about Tammet on the Australian 60 Minutes current affairs TV show

"…he can copy a picture so accurately that it could have been traced, and planned his book without jotting down a single note.

- from a 2006 article by Cassandra Jardine, first published in the Daily Telegraph

In Daniel Tammet, these two states co-occur and if we assume they are independent, the probability of someone having both synaesthesia and autism is vanishingly small – about 1 in 10,000.

- from the foreword by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Born on a Blue Day

He reports an unusual form of synesthesia, in which each number has an elaborate three-dimensional shape that incorporates size, color, texture, and sometimes movement or sound.

- from an abstract of a scheduled conference presentation to the 2006 AGM and conference of the UK Synaesthesia Association by Hubbard, Azoulai and Ramachandran

Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn't calculating: there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly.

- from an article published in The Guardian in 2005

Arithmos is especially skilled at identifying prime numbers. He claims that prime numbers do not have textures like other numbers, thus he can easily identify primes the smoothness of the shape.

- from a 2005 conference presentation abstract poster by Shai Azoulai, Edward Hubbard and V.S. Ramachandran, Arithmos a pseudonym for Daniel Tammet

DT is a savant with exceptional abilities in numerical memory and mathematical calculation …… While some memory experts accomplish similar feats after extensive training, this does not explain DT’s abilities, since he has had no explicit training.

- from a 2007 journal paper by Bor, Billington and Baron-Cohen published in Neurocase journal

In many ways, DT is the modern-day Shereshevsky (S), otherwise known as Luria’s ‘Mnemonist’ (Luria, 1966)…..Today. like DT, S would be regarded as a ‘savant’.

- from a 2007 journal paper by Baron-Cohen et al published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies

Recalling pi for Tammet is like walking through a synaesthetic landscape in which different numbers are represented by geographical features, and 'reading' them off as he goes,…

- synaesthesia researcher Julian Asher quoted in a 2013 CNN article

Presumably DT views and chunks numbers primarily via what he describes as his complex 3D ‘mental landscape’…

- from a journal paper published in Neurocase in 2007

With all due respect to Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and any living Nobel laureates, the most remarkable mind on the planet just might belong to Daniel Tammet…

- from a 2007 review of Tammet’s first book at the website of Entertainment Weekly

Now living outside of London, not only can he relate to people, he can describe what the experience of autism is like from the inside.

- from a report broadcast on ABC News World News Tonight in 2005

He really is one in a billion — an autistic savant who's found his place in our world.

- from a report on Australian 60 Minutes broadcast in 2007

Savants can't usually tell us how they do what they do, it just comes to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in his head. That's why he's exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone.

- Professor Allan Snyder quoted in a 2005 article in The Guardian newspaper

Welcome to the world of Daniel Tammet... a 27—year—old for whom even a trip to the front gate is an ordeal. Daniel is autistic and meeting new people is one of his worst nightmares.

- from a report on Australian 60 Minutes broadcast in 2007

Neil is shy, like Tammet. They live, happily, on a quiet cul-de-sac.

- from an article published in The Guardian in 2005

I hardly ever went out. I hardly ever travelled. …it was a very restricted happiness that I imposed on myself in order to control my condition and the symptoms.

- from an interview article published in The Scotsman in 2012

He offers illuminating personal insight into the worlds of autism, Asperger's, and other severe cognitive impairments.

- from the page about Daniel Tammet at the Lavin speakers’ agency, copyright 2012

But the most distressing aspect of his condition has been his difficulty in understanding emotions. I have to pretend to show emotions, such as triumph when I beat the house in Las Vegas. I don't enjoy films because the characters' expressions make no sense and I don't find verbal humour funny, though I do like slapstick.

- from an article published in 2006 in The Telegraph

In my own case, I have great difficulty remembering faces, even those of people I have known for many years.

- from the book Embracing the Wide Sky by Daniel Tammet, published in 2009

Je me perds très facilement, j'ai toujours besoin d'être accompagné, je ne peux pas conduire parce qu'il m'est très difficile de voir quelque chose dans son ensemble, énonce-t-il.

J'ai aussi des difficultés à me souvenir des visages, une tâche cognitive très complexe que chacun effectue sans s'en rendre compte, sourit-il."

Google’s translation from French:

I get lost very easily, I always need support, I can not drive because I find it very hard to see something as a whole, he states.

I also have trouble remembering faces, a place that everyone without realizing it very complex cognitive task, he smiles."

- from a 2009 French magazine article by Maureen Cofflard

He will never pass his driving test because he is distracted by everything around him.

- from a 2006 article by Cassandra Jardine, first published in the Daily Telegraph

….learning to ride a bike, learning to swim, learning to drive a car, they are things which ordinary people take for granted but I find very difficult to do.

- Tammet quoted in a 2004 article available to read through Fairfax Digital

He is writing a book on faith (he is a Christian) and then he wants to write a novel.

- from an article published in The Times in 2009

…savants like myself now play an increasingly active role in the scientific research into their abilities.

- from the foreword by Daniel Tammet to the 2010 book Island of Genius by Darold A. Treffert

All synesthetes need Mr. Tammet. He is an ambassador who has done so much to raise awareness about this trait as well as the beauty of all minds, even those that are which are (sic) different.

- from a Psychology Today blog article published in 2012 by Maureen Seaberg

Happily settled in Paris with his partner, photographer Jerome Tabet, there is a sense that Tammet is just getting a sense of his real capacity. He thinks it’s likely that he’ll take French nationality when he has the opportunity later this year, having lived in the country for five years.

- from an interview article published in The Scotsman in 2012

Mathematics, Tammet says, is illimitable. It is a language through which the human imagination expresses itself. Presumably this means mathematics has, or deserves, a literature. In Tammet, it already has a laureate.

- from a 2012 New Scientist blog post review of Tammet’s third book

Daniel Tammet is one of the world’s most famous case studies of a person reported as having synaesthesia, a harmless but scientifically interesting brain condition in which atypical experiences are triggered by sensory or conceptual brain processing. He has widely influenced the way that ordinary people all around the world think about synaesthesia, savants, autism and Asperger syndrome. His first (autobiographical) book was a bestseller and has reportedly been translated into twenty languages. His second book was also highly commercially successful, and a third book by Tammet was first published in 2012 and in 2013 in the United States. All three books have at least some autobiographical content.

Tammet has been studied by at least twenty researchers in a number of studies, most of these researchers based at universities and some of them professors. He has been the subject of two published journal papers, one in a cognitive science journal the other a neuropsychology journal, and was also the subject of studies outlined in a conference abstract report and also in a book about a language savant. Before he became famous he was also studied along with others in a published study of superior memorizers. Tammet’s abilities and neuropsychological characteristics were showcased in a highly popular hour-long science documentary about Tammet, the American version titled Brainman and the UK version titled The Boy with the Incredible Brain. A French version of this documentary was reportedly broadcast before either of these versions, and Tammet has made many appearances on French TV shows, displaying his fluency in their language.

Tammet has been mentioned by name or as a study subject in at least nineteen published journal papers, and reviews and excerpts of his writing have been published in science journals. He has been discussed or mentioned in dozens of published books and has been featured in many science website articles. Over thirty magazine articles about Tammet have been identified, including science magazines, with countless other mentions in magazine articles in a variety of languages. Tammet’s name features in several articles each of the major science magazines New Scientist and Scientific American, and articles about Tammet can also be found in educational magazines. Countless newspaper articles about Tammet or written by Tammet have been published, including many articles in the internationally respected newspaper The Guardian spanning at least nine years. Tammet has also been interviewed for The Times newspaper and two of his books have been reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement.

Daniel Tammet has been interviewed or featured in at least twenty-four television shows, including 60 Minutes in the United States and 60 Minutes in Australia, The Late Show with David Letterman and many French chat shows. Many radio shows about Tammet or featuring interviews with Tammet have been identified, including many interviews on BBC radio stations and three interviews on the publicly-funded Australian radio station ABC Radio National.

In 2006 and again in 2012 Daniel gave talks at the Edinburgh Book Festival and he has made many other speaking appearances, including a TEDx talk in Paris and an address to the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). Tammet reported in 2012 that he had been elected as a fellow of the RSA and as such is entitled to add FRSA to the end of his name.

In 2013 for at least the second time in his life Tammet was featured in a television documentary with a scientific theme. Tammet was one of thirteen Les visionnaires interviewed by the French designer Philippe Starck in the documentary Futur Par Starck which was broadcast on French television in June 2013.

Biography of Daniel Paul Corney/Daniel Paul Tammet FRSA

The story begins on January 31st 1979. This date is given as Daniel Tammet’s birthdate at the Wikipedia and it is also the birthdate shown on the British passport shown at the beginning of the Brainman/The Boy with the Incredible Brain documentary (2005), a documentary about Daniel Tammet. The shot of Tammet’s passport at the beginning of this documentary give it an air of authenticity and might have discouraged any viewers watching the documentary who thought they recognized the subject of the documentary as Daniel Corney. The given names on the passport shown in the documentary are Daniel Paul and the surname is Tammet, which would have been Daniel Tammet’s legal name on the date that the passport was issued (April 16th 2002), but this was not the surname that he was born under. The place of birth on the passport is Barking, which is an area in East London. It has been indisputably established from a number of sources, including a video on YouTube of a youthful Daniel Tammet identifying himself as Daniel Paul Corney, that Daniel Tammet’s original surname was not Tammet (Johnson 2005) but was Corney (Foer 2011 p.219). The Wikipedia now gives Tammet’s birth name as Daniel Paul Corney, citing Joshua Foer’s book as the source of this information.

In the Acknowledgements section of his first book Born on a Blue Day (2006) Tammet thanked his family, listing mother Jennifer, father Kevin, brothers Lee, Steven, and Paul and sisters Claire, Maria, Natasha, Anna-Marie and Shelley. This is consistent with a family acknowledgement in Tammet’s third book. Their surnames would presumably have been Corney. Only first names are given in the books. Glimpses of Tammet’s mother can be seen in the Brainman/The Boy with the Incredible Brain documentary in video of her participating in Tammet’s clinical assessment at the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, and also in an interview for the US 60 Minutes current affairs TV show (2007). Descriptions of Tammet’s parents’ working-class occupations vary in different sources. An article about Tammet published in The Times in 2009 described his father as a factory worker who battled with schizophrenia for much of his adult life (Treneman 2009). In his first book Tammet described a time when neither parent was working while they had many young children to raise. Tammet has characterised his childhood and that of his siblings as impoverished but happy, despite a family history of unusual mental traits and conditions. An outline of the names, characteristics and intellectual achievements of Tammet’s siblings can be found on pages 56-57 of the Hodder and Stoughton paperback edition of his second book Embracing the Wide Sky (2009). There is an abundance of evidence in Tammet’s first book that he had a school to adult life friendship with Rehan Qayoom, a British man with a foreign cultural heritage. He has quite a presence in his own right on the internet, and has written in various places about Tammet and their schooldays, but not all of these pieces of writing and audio-visual items remain available.

In Tammet’s second book he wrote that his father had battled for a long time with schizophrenia, but I could find no mention of schizophrenia in his first book, even though it included a lengthy description of an oddly-vague physical collapse illness affecting his father which was identified as some kind of mental illness. Perhaps this was a censored description of mental illness written with the book’s potential market of young adult and child readers in mind. It turns out this would have been a realistic expectation, as the American Library Association included this book in its list of Best Books for Young Adults 2008 . Unlike typical cases of schizophrenia, Tammet’s father’s illness as described in the book had an onset well into adulthood. A family history of schizophrenia has been mentioned in other publications about Tammet, as early as March 2004 when it was mentioned in an article in The Times promoting Tammet’s Pi recitation event. A case study journal paper published in 2007 in the Journal of Consciousness Studies characterised Tammet’s family as quite an abnormal one; an father with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, Tammet and a brother of his both cases of Asperger syndrome, and all seven of Tammet’s other siblings showing strong and narrow intellectual interests, which the autism researchers who wrote the paper no doubt interpreted as evidence of autism rather than evidence of youthful intellectual enthusiasm, ambition or intellectual gifts. A diagnosis of Asperger syndrome for Tammet’s younger brother Steven has been mentioned in a number of sources, including Tammet’s first two books.

In 1985 the pop psychology book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks was published. Tammet was a young child at the time and too young to have read the book as a new release, but the book was hugely popular and influential and is still a part of popular culture. The book consists of anecdotes and case studies of neurological patients in the style of the Russian neurologist Luria, including autistic and savant patients. The chapter about disabled male savant twins with autistic characteristics features a number of themes that would later be found in Tammet’s self-acount. Sacks asserted that the twins had low IQ scores and could not do simple addition or subtraction but they nevertheless mysteriously had hyperthymestic memory ability (exceptional autobiographical memory) and were able to calculate large prime numbers in minutes and perform accurate calendar calculations. Sacks wrote of such abilities as a mysterious ability to simply see the answers. Sacks speculated that the twins might have imaginations filled with numbers as visual elements of a landscape, rather than iconic symbols of concepts. At the end of the chapter Sacks wrote of the mysteriously special significance that prime numbers have for some autistic people. In 1989 Dr Darold Treffert wrote about the same twins in his pop psychology book about savants Extraordinary people, repeating Sack’s idea of the visual landscape of numbers in the imagninations of the savant twins. In later years Dr Treffert would play a crucial role in Tammet’s rise to fame.

Tammet’s first book Born on a Blue Day is the primary published source of information about Tammet’s boyhood and youth, but there were some interesting omissions. Two unusual and revealing video clips from the 1990s were uploaded in 2012 to YouTube on Rehan Qayoom’s YouTube channel. They are currently unlisted, meaning they can only be accessed by those who have the links (see the main listing of items about Tammet in this book), and they aren’t searchable. Both videos were reportedly recorded in 1995, showing a youthful Daniel Tammet wearing an Islamic-looking hat attending question and answer sessions, asking questions with a historical theme of the then leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. Tammet’s interest in historical matters is consistent with the interests and school study described by Tammet in his first book, but a youthful interest in Islam certainly wasn’t part of the official story told in Tammet’s books or told by international mass media organizations. The most significant piece of information from these videos is probably the sight of a youthful Daniel Tammet identifying himself as Daniel Paul Corney, the name that identifies him as a past competitor in the World Memory Championships. Other interesting details found in these videos are the glasses that Tammet wore, which suggests that Tammet has used contact lenses since his earliest media appearances, and also the softly-spoken way of speaking with a characteristic mispronunciation of some sounds, which suggests that Tammet’s slightly quaint way of speaking is not contrived, because it predates his fame as a savant.

Tammet’s GCSE exam results from 1995 (he would have been 16) are listed in chapter six of Born on a Blue Day. They include a B in Mathematics, As in English subjects and French and German and the highest possible grade in History. Daniel’s ordinary grade in mathematics is explained as the result of poor performance in Algebra, which he then explained as resulting from having some emotional issue with substituting numbers for letters with which he has no synaesthesia associations. A number of commentators who are sceptical about Tammet’s savantism have found evidence in Tammet’s GCSE results to support their positions. Some have argued that if Tammet was the natural inborn mathematics savant he would not have got a B in maths. Some who are sceptical of claims that have been made by tabloid journalists, documentary-makers and academics about Tammet mastering languages such as Icelandic, Spanish and German in a week or even a weekend have cited Tammet’s effective language learning during his school years as evidence of unacknowledged prior learning.

According to Chapter 7 of Born on a Blue Day, at the age of 18 Tammet decided not to go to university when he finished school. Instead he did some unsuccessful job-hunting and then decided to do volunteer work overseas through Voluntary Services Overseas. He was posted to teach English as a second language to adults in Lithuania. On his return there was some more unsuccessful job-hunting. Christmas 2001 was a time of unemployment for Tammet but he was supported by his working male partner Neil whom he was living with. In the summer of 2002 they moved to Herne Bay and Tammet conceived of the idea of creating an educational website business, with the technical help of his computer-professional partner. It was named Optimnem. Searches of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine verify that Optimnem was operating in the year 2002 and the Wikipedia states that this was the year of its establishment. It had a long life with radical changes and was a vehicle for Tammet’s online business which offered language and maths tutoring and a number of other services. At the time of writing it appears to still be operating.

There is quite a collection of interesting personal events that happened in the years 1999-2002 and possibly earlier which Tammet apparently forgot to include in his autobiography, which is rather an irony for someone who has forged an international reputation as a leading memory savant. Tammet had evidently operated an older website before he created Optimnem, titled "www.DanielTämmet.com" which appears to have operated as early as November 2000. At the about page of Tammet’s oldest website which was captured by the internet archive in 2001, Tammet wrote that he had been a teacher in Scandinavia as well as holding a volunteer position as a lecturer of English in Eastern Europe, both before 1999: http://web.archive.org/web/20010623043910/http://www.danieltammet.com/fr_about000.htm I found no mention of teaching in Scandinavia in Tammet’s first two books.

An abundance of sources, including writing by Tammet himself, verify that in 26th – 27th August 1999 and 21st -22nd August 2000 Daniel Tammet competed in the World Memory Championships (WMC), both years held in London, England, under his original name of Daniel Corney. In 2000 Tammet attained a rating of fourth in the world in 2000 (Foer 2011 p.219). Tammet's WMC achievements include winning a gold medal in the names and faces event (Foer 2011 p.230). WMC records of Daniel Corney were readily available on the internet at the time of writing, but are not explicitly linked with the name or identity of Daniel Tammet. According to one source the organizer of both 1999 and 2000 World Memory Championships was Michael Tipper.

On October 6th 2000 the Mnemon Clubs Network at Yahoo! Clubs was founded by Danielius21. We know this was Daniel Tammet because a link to the archived Founder’s Personal Home Page led to Daniel Tammet’s first website www.DanielTämmet.com. This network was set up to give advice to the 46 members on setting up their own Mnemon Club, a type of club envisioned as teaching memory sport and other intellectual skills and feats. It appears that topics of discussion included Tammet’s invented Uusisuom language and memory sport techniques. The main page of this club or forum was accessible at least up to February 2002, based on archived records. Its web addresses are now dead links.

In March of 2001 Daniel Tammet using the name Danielius22 set up a web forum centred on the Uusisuom language, a language created by Tammet, and he also started a discussion of the language at an email list under the name Daniel44 about constructed languages. In April 2001 someone, probably Tammet, set up a Yahoo! group about the language. The Yahoo! group and the web forum did not attract much activity.

In March and April of 2001 Daniel Tammet posted a total of 89 reviews at the now-defunct consumer review website Epinions under the name danielius with the name Daniel Tammet given at his profile page. Most of his reviews were posted in a three-day period, a prodigious output. In October of 2001 it appears that Tammet operated another Epinions membership under the names Dr Daniel Andersson and doctor_daniel, posting only four reviews as an experienced medical doctor, two of them reviews of topics that a medical doctor is unlikely to know much about, such as a music CD by The Carpenters (a known youthful enthusiasm of Daniel Tammet) and a list of tips for saving or earning money using services or products based on the internet. One can only conclude from the output of this account that the author was pretending to be a doctor and was quite desperate to improve his financial situation. It is harder to know what to take from the output of the earlier and more prolific Epinions membership. Many of the product reviews are of toys for young children or baby products, with claims by the author about young siblings playing with these items. Given the chronology of Tammet’s siblings’ ages given in his first book, such claims are at best historical. One review even mentions a son! Either this is an outrageous lie or Daniel Tammet has kept a huge secret that has not been mentioned in any of his books or media appearances. Did Tammet visit one of the reviewed Disneyland parks in the (northern hemisphere) summer of 2000, a month or so before he competed in his second World Memory Championship in August of 2000 in London, as suggested in some reviews? Did he go on a cruise ship holiday, not long after competing in 2000, as suggested in another review? Had he been on a number of cruise ship holidays before March 2001? In one review Tammet recommends the use of colour and the senses as memory aids, which could be interpreted as a naïve description of synaesthesia, or could be nonsense. In another review Tammet’s complaints about noise, overstimulating rides and too many people could perhaps be taken as evidence of sensory hypersensitivities typical of autistic conditions, or could be interpreted as more ordinary complaints. Perhaps Tammet’s reviews about the delighted play of young siblings, a son, liner cruises and Disneyland holidays represent wishful thinking. Did his experience of being the eldest in a large family nurture in his character a genuine love of family life, which he perhaps thought was beyond his reach as a gay man? Were the holidays in his reviews nothing more or less than the aspirations of an ambitious unemployed Englishman? A few firm conclusions can be made based on these reviews; the author isn’t a completely trustworthy authority, he has written accounts of his life that are at odds with the simple and humble lifestyle of an unemployed autistic savant recluse depicted in Tammet’s first book and related publicity, he knows a lot about memory techniques and has an evident enthusiasm for the subject, claimed that he wasn’t born with superior memory skills, and was keen to promote and profit from his The Optimnem Mindpower and Advanced Memory Skills course, which was the subject of a large self-promoting review.

Even though there is evidence that www.DanielTämmet.com was operating in 2000-2001 and was clearly operated by Daniel Tammet, I found no mention of it in Tammet’s books. In the year 2001 Tammet changed his surname from Corney (Foer 2011) by deed poll reportedly because it did not fit his self-image (Johnson 2005). This was also the year in which he contacted Karen Ammond of the publicity and marketing company KBC Media, with the aim of bringing his knowledge and skills to the world (KBC Media website, accessed in 2012, 2013). Karen and her team then reportedly advised Tammet that the best way to reach his goal would be through a documentary, international media and then a book. (KBC Media). Exactly when and under what circumstances Tammet was given this advice is an interesting question. In a 2013 article about Tammet published by CNN Tammet reportedly claimed that he realised after his Pi recitation feat in 2004 that he had a gift for communication, and this set him on course to become a full-time writer, a quite different account of the timing and forces behind his career. Another questionable account of the development of his career by Tammet can be found in an April 2007 article in London’s Financial Times. Tammet claimed that he was approached by a television documentary team which were making a documentary about savants (this could only have been a reference to Brainman/The Boy with the Incredible Brain) and through that documentary he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and savantism. He claimed that their approach followed his Pi memory event in 2004. Considering that Tammet’s publicist since 2001 was an associate producer in the documentary and documentary-standard film of the Pi event was included in the documentary, this claim appears to hold no water. Was Tammet’s rise to fame a lucky accident or was it planned and expertly-executed? Since 2001 Tammet had engaged the services of a successful publicity company, so the former seems unlikey.

In 2001 Tammet was describing himself as a World-class mentathlete, memory sport pioneer, personal empowerment coach, spiritual development teacher and speaker and a leading authority on Mindpower and Human Potential at his first website. At the About section of the website Daniel Tammet described in great detail his achievements in the WMC in 1999 and 2000, which are identical to the achievements of Daniel Corney. This webpage also included the claim that the author had been a volunteer teacher of English in Eastern Europe, which is consistent with the autobiographical account in Tammet’s first book, published years after this website was created.

For Tammet the period from 2000 to 2002 was a time of genuine achievement and budding entrepreneurship, and also clearly a time of much frustration and ambition in terms of finance and career, as is evidenced in the many commercial and dodgy forum posts from that period which were clearly the work of Tammet, dabbling in areas such as health advice and psychic readings. He signed some of these postings with the name Daniel Tammet, a name that at the time wouldn’t have been used by some impersonator of a famous person, because the name Daniel Tammet wouldn’t have been famous back then. Some brief media stories about Tammet from April 2002 found on news feed websites appear to be evidence of an unsuccessful attempt to promote the idea of a book by Tammet about calculating and memory techniques based on his achievements in the 2000 World Memory Championship.

While it is clear that Daniel Tammet is and was in many ways not the same person as the image that has been promoted for public consumption, the evidence of his activities during the years before his fame do offer an abundance of proof that he was genuinely an intelligent person willing to devote substantial time to unusual intellectual pursuits. In other words, Daniel Tammet was every bit as nerdy as his public image, but he certainly also had ambitions and plans that were not as innocent as those of a stereotypical semi-autistic geek. From 1999 to 2002 Tammet/Corney competed in an international memory competition, changed his name, engaged a publicist, created two websites, settled down domestically with his first (same-sex) partner, wrote many internet forum postings under a variety of guises, promoted himself as a coach, teacher and mentathlete, volunteered as a memory research study subject, had a go at creating online communities (one focused on the concept of memory training clubs and the other about a language that Tammet invented), launched his website/tutoring business Optimnem, and in 2001 it appears that Tammet introduced to the world two languages that he had created. He never was your average English guy. He also wasn’t the recluse that he was supposed to have been during this period in his life.

By assembling