Daniel Tammet and the Power of Perception
December 3rd, 2010Via: Technofascism Blog:
If you’ve never heard of Daniel Tammet before, it’s probably because our mainstream press tends to focus on trivialities so much that the truly amazing stories go mostly unnoticed. Daniel Tammet is a savant that can not only perform mental calculations out to 100 decimal places of accuracy, memorize PI to 22,000 decimal places, and learn human languages in one week, he is also the most functional savant in the world. Unlike most savants, who are retarded in many other facets of their life, Daniel Tammet can pass as a fairly “normal” person. In fact, he is so functional that he can actually describe what goes on in his head when he performs these amazing mental feats. And what he describes seems impossible to most scientists: Daniel apparently doesn’t do any calculations at all. Instead, he visually sees the answer appear before him as a specific shape, color and texture. In fact, he describes that he solves math problems by observing the shapes that dance before his eyes and he recites PI by flying over a multi-colored landscape that represents that number stretching into eternity. To Daniel, the answer to these thorny math problems is obvious and he is often very impressed by the mental effort of “normal” people that solve such problems only by brute-force calculations.
Daniel Tammet’s unique powers of perception effectively demonstrate that the answers to so many of our problems are literally right before our eyes but we simply don’t notice them. Perhaps a change in perception is what the world needs most, instead of an increase in more brute-force technology.
If you’d like to learn more about Daniel Tammet, and what is possible with the right form of perception, this video is a real eye-opener: