In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks wrote about two autistic men, twins who had an extraordinary relationship with numbers. Sacks recalled that during one of his sessions a matchbox fell from a table, disgorging its contents, and the twins cried out “111”, the exact number of matches that lay on the floor. They later explained that they had not counted the matches, but could “see” how many there were. “The twins live exclusively in a thought-world of numbers,” Sacks concluded. “They have no interest in the stars shining, or the hearts of men.”
Daniel Tammet only mentions Sacks once in his new book, Nine Minds, but the writings of the British neurologist haunt these portraits of autistic people. Like those twins, Tammet is on the autistic spectrum, can perform absurdly complex calculations in his head, and is able to live in a “thought-world of numbers”, and yet he is also a writer whose qualities contradict the oft-made assumption that autism and empathy cannot coexist within the same mind. Part literary experiment, part work of activism, his book is an extended riposte to the assumptions in Sacks’s chapter; he celebrates the gifts and talents of autistic people, while exploring the richness of their desires and dreams.
