2009年07月17日
also born on a blue day
OK, here is a book for you English readers. Born on a Blue Day by
Daniel Tammet. When I started it, I had not known anything about
the author, who is an autistic savant with amazing creative and
cognitive talents. In this memoir, he covers a range of topics,
including his successful challenge to recite from memory the first
22,514 digits of the mathematical constant pi (let's see if I can do
three digits: 3.14 - yes!).
Most interesting for me are the parts when he describes his visual and
emotional experience of numbers - what scientists call "synesthesia".
Can you imagine this going on in your mind?
"Numbers are my friends, and they are always around me. Each one
is unique and has its own personality. The number 11 is friendly and
5 is loud, whereas 4 is both shy and quiet - it's my favorite number,
perhaps because it reminds me of myself. Some are big - 23, 667,
1,179 - while others are small: 6,13,581. Some are beautiful, like 333,
and some are ugly, like 289. To me, every number is special." (p.2)
Fantastic, isn't it? In a very small way, I can almost feel what he means
- 289 is kind of ugly, don't you think? Daniel Tammet also sees days
of the week as certain colors - thus the book title, which refers to his
birth on a Wednesday - always "a blue day". After a quick online
search (again, I don't have quite that kind of brainpower!) I was
comforted to know that my birthday, May 10, 1967, was also a
Wednesday - because blue is my favorite color, and that just feels
right.
But beyond this exposure to a fascinating story, what I got from the
book was a renewed incentive to understand how other people learn.
One of my company's main business areas is in professional training,
most often for multi-national corporations and audiences that include
a wide range of scientists, marketers, researchers, etc. We work
hard to get our key messages across to these many types of people,
but sometimes it is easy to forget that the individuals do approach
problems very differently, depending on their own innate abilities,
experiences, and cultures.
The passage that really brought this home to me in the book comes
when Daniel Tammet is talking about his elementary school days:
"I often found it confusing when we were given arithmetic worksheets
in class with the different numbers printed identically in black. To me,
it seemed that the sheets were covered in printing errors. I couldn't
figure out, for example, why eight was not larger than six, or why
nine was printed in black instead of blue... When I wrote my answers
on the paper, the teacher complained that my writing was too uneven
and messy. I was told to write every number the same as the others.
I didn't like having to write the numbers down wrong."
So next time I am explaining something for the third time in a lecture
setting, repeating myself, not getting through and sensing frustration on
both sides, hopefully I will remember to step back and try a different
approach. Maybe ask the group to gaze out the window at the
massive 9's that dot the Shinjuku skyline, to try to imagine which
number might sound like "a clap of thunder or the sound of waves
crashing against rocks" (5), or which one could feel "lumpy like
porridge" (37). At the very least, the conversation wouldn't be boring...