By Daniel Tammet

Daniel sees numbers as shapes, colours and textures and can perform extraordinary maths in his head.  He can also speak a language fluently from scratch in a week.  He has Savant Syndrome, an extremely rare form of Asperger’s that gives him almost unimaginable mental powers, much like the Rain Main portrayed by Dustin Hoffman.

Daniel has a compulsive need for order and routine – he eats exactly 45 grams of porridge for breakfast and cannot leave the house without counting the number of items of clothing he’s wearing.  If he gets stressed or unhappy he closes his eyes and counts.  But in some ways Daniel is not at all like the rain Main.  He is virtually unique amongst people who have severe autistic disorders in being capable of living a gully independent life.  It is his incredible self-awareness and ability to communicate what it feels like to live in a unique way that makes his story so powerful.

‘Everyone is said to have a perfect moment once in a while, an experience of complete peace and connection, like looking out from the top of the Eiffel Tower or watching a falling star high in the night sky.  I do not have many such moments, but Neil says that is okay because being rare is what makes them so special. 

 My most recent came one weekend last summer at home – they often happen to me while I am at home –after a meal I had cooked and eaten with Neil. 

We were sitting together in the living room, feeling full and happy.  All of a sudden I experienced a kind of self-forgetting and in that brief, shining moment all my anxiety and awkwardness seemed to disappear.
 
I turned to Neil and asked him if he had felt the same sensation and he said he had.

I imagine these moments as fragments or splinters scattered across a lifetime. If a person could somehow collect them all up and stick them together he would have a perfect hour or even a perfect day.  And I think in that hour or day he would be closer to the mystery of what it is to be human.  It would be like having a glimpse of heaven.”

This book is both touching and illuminating, for Born on a Blue day explores what it’s like to be special and in sop doing gives an insight into one of the distinctive features that makes us all humans – our minds.