Colored by Numbers
Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
by Daniel Tammet
Free Press, 2007
(256 pages, $14.00, paperback)
reviewed by Franklin Freeman
"I was never purposefully impolite,” writes Daniel Tammet in his memoir of life with Asperger’s Syndrome. A high-functioning form of autism, Asperger’s is characterized by a lack of the “social sense” most of us take for granted.
“I did not understand that the purpose of conversation was anything other than to talk about the things that most interested you. I would talk, in very great detail, until I had emptied myself of everything that I wanted to say and felt that I might burst if I was interrupted in midflow.”
Tammet also has synesthesia, “a rare mixing of the senses” (hence the title), and is also a savant—think of Kim Peek, the basis of the character Dustin Hoffman played in the movie Rainman. In fact, Tammet met Peek himself, and they hit it off by telling each other their birth dates and then telling the other what day they were born on, without referring to a calendar.
Tammet grew up in England, in a large family which taught him by necessity some of the social skills he needed to get on in the world. Eventually he learned about his synesthesia and his Asperger’s and decided to use them for good. To raise money for a charity, for example, he attempted and set a British and European record for the longest recitation of the number pi: “22,514 digits of pi without error in a time of five hours and nine minutes.”
A Religious Man
He is also a religious man: “Many people are surprised when they learn that I am a Christian,” he notes, because they assume “that being autistic makes it difficult or impossible to believe in God or explore spiritual issues.”
It doesn’t: “It is certainly true that my Asperger’s makes it harder for me to have empathy or think abstractly, but it hasn’t prevented me from thinking about deeper questions concerning such things as life and death, love and relationships.”
Tammet was not interested in religion or God when he was younger, because “God was not something that I could see or hear or feel, and because the religious arguments that I read and heard did not make any sense to me.”
Discovering G. K. Chesterton’s works as a teenager was the “turning point.” Tammet speculates that Chesterton himself was possibly “on the higher-functioning end of the autistic spectrum,” not only because of his brilliance—“His secretaries reported that he would dictate one essay while simultaneously writing another by hand on a different subject”—but also because he “was always getting lost, so absorbed in his thoughts that he would sometimes have to phone his wife to help him get back home.”
Franklin Freeman is a freelance writer living in Saco, Maine, with his wife and four children.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
33.3—May/June 2020
On Flight & Fight in the Present Tribulation by Douglas Farrow
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
