Incridible Brain

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. He can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds. But unlike other savants, who can perform similar feats, Tammet can describe how he does it.

In his mind, he says, each number up to 10,000 has its own unique shape and feel, that he can "see" results of calculations as landscapes, and that he can "sense" whether a number is prime or composite. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and pi as beautiful


He also has linguistic skils. He is capable of learning new languages very quickly. To prove this for a Channel Five documentary, Tammet was challenged to learn Icelandic in one week, a language with a popular reputation as one of the world's most difficult languages to learn.