Daniel Tammet Quotes

When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think.

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.

I'm the slowest reader in the world, because I perform it all in my head.

I can be fascinated with very little things. The clouds stimulate my imagination, and sometimes I just sit somewhere and go on dreaming for a long time. Your head is also a computer. When you're dreaming, you are simulating a world in which you are living.

I recited Pi to 22,514 decimal points in five hours and nine minutes. I was able to do this because of weeks of study, aided by the unusual synaesthesic way my mind perceives numbers as complex multidimensional coloured and textured shapes.

In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my 'friends.'

Math? Forget about it. If I add four plus eight plus six, I have to count on my fingers. I guess I'm hooked up differently.

Every second is mapped out and he has this total childish fascination with color and shapes and sequences.

I've got a real sense of three-dimensional geometry. I can look at a flat piece of fabric and know that if I put a slit in it and make some fabric travel around a square, then when you lift it up it will drape in a certain way, and I can feel how that will happen.

I learned just recently, in fact, that a lot of people who read do not form a visual image from what they're reading. They just don't. They follow the events and get the resonance with the language, but they have only a vague, general idea of what the characters look like.

I do think in numbers. My mind works that way.

I'm a relentless sketcher. It goes back to how you process the world around you - the whole left-brain, right-brain thing. Some people are data-driven. I've always been more visual.

When someone is on the phone telling me a story, I'm hearing the soundtrack that goes with it.

I think I still like science and art better, but geometry is a big improvement over algebra.

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.

If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.

I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.

It's like when you read a book and you know that the words are important, but the images blossoming in your imagination are even more important because it's your mind that allows the words to come to life.

When you're reading something, your imagination goes and you see it in your mind. Sometimes my instincts with that are right, and sometimes they're wrong.

The picture is in your head, in your imagination, everything.

The more we see the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

Visualization. It may be the most important part of your mental package.

Much of what we see in the universe ... starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.

If I sit and daydream, the images rush by like a succession of colored slides.