Daniel Tammet is called "Brain Man" in Britain. But unlike most savants, he has no obvious mental disability, and most important to scientists, he can describe his own thought process. He may very well be a scientific Rosetta stone, a key to understanding the brain.
He describes numbers in shapes and colors and says, "pi is one of the most beautiful things in all the world."
He first made headlines at Oxford, when he publicly recited the endless sequence of numbers embodied by the Greek letter "Pi." Pi, the numbers we use to calculate the dimensions of a circle, are usually rounded off to 3.14. but its numbers actually go on to infinity.
Daniel studied the sequence – a thousand numbers to a page.
"And I would sit and I would gorge on them. And I would just absorb hundreds and hundreds at a time," he tells Safer.
It took him several weeks to prepare and then Daniel headed to Oxford, where with number crunchers checking every digit, he opened the floodgates of his extraordinary memory.
Tammet says he was able to recite, in a proper order, 22,514 numbers. It took him over five hours and he did it without a single mistake