-He said, “Using my own synesthetic experiences since early childhood, I have grown up with the ability to handle and calculate huge numbers in my head without any conscious effort, just like the Raymond Babbitt character. In fact, this is a talent common to several other real-life savants.
- Dr. Darold Treffet, a Wisconsin physician and the leading researcher in the study of savant syndrome, gives one example, of a blind man with “a faculty of calculating to a degree little short of marvelous”.
-My favorite kind of calculation is power multiplication, which means multiplying a number by itself a specified number of times. Multiplying a number by itself is called squaring: for example, the square of 72 is 72*72= 5,184.
-Like most individuals with savant syndrome, I am also on the autistic spectrum. I have Asperger’s syndrome, a relatively mild and high-functioning form of autism that affects around 1 en every 300 people in the United Kingdom. According to a 2001 study by the U.K’s National Autistic Society, nearly half of all adults with Asperger’s syndrome are not diagnosed until after the age of sixteen. I was finally diagnosed at age 25 following tests and an interview at the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge.
- Asperger’s syndrome the diagnosis is not easy and cannot be made by blood test or brain scan: doctors have to observe behavior and study the individual’s development history from infancy.
-For as long as I can remember, I have experienced numbers in the visual, synesthetic way that I do. Numbers are my first language, one I often think and feel in. Emotions can be hard for me to understand or know how to react to, so I often use number 6 to help me. (Sad or depressed).
-Sometimes people I meet for the first time remind me of a particular number and this helps me to be comfortable around them. They might be very tall and remind me of the number 9, or round and remind me of the number 3. (Unhappy or