Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet

Ever since I took a course at Evergreen on the science of the mind, I have been interested in how the brain works. This book is amazing, because the author, Daniel Tammet, who is an autistic savant is able to describe how he learns. He sees numbers and letters as shapes that do not look like numbers -- tall round short and with colors. He has numbers that make him happy like 333 and numbers that make him sad like 117. He is best known for memorizing Pi out to 22,500 digits without an error, which he did as a fund raiser for epilepsy.  He also can learn foreign languages easily, like Icelandic in a week. Daniel tells the painful story of growing up different and how he has learned to cope with his idiosyncracies in a world that did not understand him. One of my favorite parts was when he got up the courage to volunteer to teach English in Lithuania. He had never been away from home and did not like to encounter strange things. This is a great story about the people who loved Daniel (he has 9 siblings and his parents) and his own personal struggle. This guy is one of my heroes.

"People with Asperger's syndrome do want to make friends but find it difficult to do so. The keen sense of isolation was something I felt very deeply and was very painful for me. As a way of compensating for the lack of friends, I created my own...We talked about my love of ladybirds and my coin towers, about books, about numbers, about tall trees...once I asked her why I was so different from the other children, but she shook her head  and said she could not say.  I worried that the answer was terrible and that she was trying to protect me."