Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind

I've never heard of Daniel Tammet prior to my reading of this book. The books topic and description are what drew me in. After reading the book over a few days, I can easily say that I'm better for it. I learned a lot that I didn't know, but what I really enjoyed was taking a peak inside Daniels mind. Learning how he sees the world, how he sees numbers, and learning more about autism and savants. Overall this is a great book, if I had to compare it, I would say the format and structure would fit well into a 10 part TV series. Meaning each chapter covers a certain topic (such has how Daniel learns a language) then moves on to another topic. I enjoyed this book, and I'm going to pick up his other book Born on a Blue Day soon. PS, the last chapter was really interesting it covers the future which makes for a very fascinating topic.

Tammet's first work, Born on a Blue Day, was a beautiful and touching memoir of his extraordinary life (imagine, if you will, if you can, having Asperger Syndrome, epilepsy, synesthesia, and being gay) from birth to age 27 or so. Now, in this mindblowing tour de force, he presents the (still radical) idea that the savant brain is not radically different from a 'normal' brain and argues that all manifestations of intelligence (something Tammet, who is fluent in over a dozen languages, has created his own language - Manti, committed to memory over 22,000 digits of pi, and learned Icelandic in less than a week, clearly has a lot of) deserve recognition. This book should be a must-read for anyone seeking to better understand how our brains both do function and could function.

I didn't read Daniel Tammet's first book, Born on a Blue Day (yet) but this book was one of the most fascinating and informative books about the way the human mind works that I've ever read. Daniel Temmet is an autistic savant and talks in this book about how similar autistic and non-autistic minds function. It gave me a whole new perspective on how we learn, remember and process thoughts. It was particularly helpful to me in understanding how we learn language since I've been learning French for the past 10 years and more recently Italian. It's much more involved than I previously thought but I also came away with the idea that it's possible to learn several languages and be able to function in each of them. According to research it's believed that when a person learns more than one language as a baby and small child, both languages occupy the same small section of the brain, but when learning a second or third language, they are kept in a separate section of the brain. This makes sense since little kids can often go back and forth between languages whereas when I try to switch I can almost feel my brain opening another "compartment". He discusses IQ tests and IQ and disputes where they can actually measure intelligence. There is a whole section on how the human brain processes information and how we remember things. We often hear that our brains are like computers, just processing information but he shows how they are so much more intricate than even the most advanced computers. There are studies showing that babies can count and he discusses arguments that a "number module" exists within the human brain. There is so much fascinating information packed into this book and Tammet's writing style makes it all so interesting and not at all a dry subject. I had a hard time putting it down and read the book in two days. The only thing I wish, is that there was a little more about the way his brain processes subjects and information discussed in this book. But from what I understand, his first book, Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant goes more deeply into this. It's a book that I definitely want to read after reading this one.

Daniel Tammet's first book, Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, provides a fascinating insight into a mind that understood numbers much better than it understood people. His second book provides amazing insights into our own minds. Tammet's book is based on wonderfully detailed and lucid descriptions of research on how people think. He then applies his learning to every day experiences to show how less gifted people like me can apply that research in a practical way. For example, in one chapter he analyzes the issue of information overload and attempts to cope with it, including recent studies showing that multi-tasking is not really very effective. He is eloquent on the "beauties" of the Dewey Decimal System, and concludes: "Dewey's system is a marvel of organization, but I have given detailed examples here in order to make an important philosophical as well as practical point. Information is meaningless unless it can be made sense of, and to do that it requires an internal system of thought and ideas that can provide context and relate it to other information we have already learned. "Many people lack a coherent worldview with which they can evaluate and assimilate new information. The problem of information overload, therefore, may not be the quantity of it but our inability to know what to do with it. One possible explanation for this is the common confusion between information and ideas. In his book, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking, history professor Theodore Roszak makes the point that the mind thinks with ideas, not information. Ideas are of primary importance because they define, make sense of, and create information. Roszak goes further still by arguing that the greatest ideas, such as the Founding Fathers' "all men are created equal," do not contain any information at all. Rather, such ideas are the result of an innate human sensibility that reaches beyond strings of data to recognize and synthesize transcendent patterns of thought. A personal worldview then helps put information back into perspective, giving it an intuitive place in our minds like the books in a library." Tammet maintains a wonderfully informative website called Optimnem where he explores his (and our) minds. This book is the best self help book for the brain I've ever read; I've enjoyed every minute I've spent reading his writing. Robert C. Ross 2009

Autistic savant author Daniel Tammet clearly has a beautiful mind, but the real focus of this important book is the boundless ability of EVERY human brain, "the treasures buried deep within us all." Tammet argues convincingly that the differences between a savant and an average person are not really so great. He debunks myths about savants, many due to the movie Rain Man, that seem to rob the humanity from these rare people. After several chapters explaining how his own mind works, he gives tips on how everyday brains can improve their functioning. Tammet shows how IQ testing does not show the true intelligence of a person, and is inherently flawed. He agrees with Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, and shows that when schools espouse this view, student's grades improve. I found it fascinating to learn that Tammet has trouble remember faces, but numbers are alive for him. "In my head, numbers assume complex shapes that interact to form solutions to sums," he explains. "I do not know where my number shapes come from. I do not know why I think of 6 as tiny and 9 as very large or why threes are round and fours pointy." Peeking in on such a mind is an interesting experience; I highly recommend it! Here's the chapter list: 1. Wider Than the Sky 2. Measuring Minds: Intelligence and Talent 3. Seeing What is Not There 4. A World of Words 5. The Number Instinct 6. The Biology of Creativity 7. Light to Sight 8. Food for Thought 9. Thinking by Numbers 10. The Future of the Mind