THIS ARTICLE IS NOW PART OF A BOOK!!!!
Daniel Tammet: the Boy with the Incredible Story
by
Lili Marlene
Published by Smashwords
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where biography meets neuroscience, where biography meets nonsense
5 comments:
Lily! You are a Terror...
Teh Intawebs (and life) is full of people bull-sh!tting and they need to be called out...
I think some folks do more than their fair share of the broadcasting of fertilizer.
This professor is an inexhaustible source of entertainment.
Your post is an excellent summary of some of the inconsistencies in Tammet's account.
There are also some big inconsistencies in the scientific accounts of him that don't appear to have been picked up by the academic community - at least, I can find no mention of them.
Darold Treffert, consultant to the film Rain Man and often cited as the worlds leading expert on savants has a web page which extols Tammet's savant abilities, and in particular says Tammet was "...invited to London’s Institute of Neurology to undergo tests for a landmark study of prodigious mental ability. The summarized data, co-written by some of Britain’s leading brain scientists, appeared in the New Year 2003 edition of the highly prestigious Nature neuro-scientific magazine."
That sounds very impressive. But look closer, and the study in question turns out to give absolutely no support to him having unusual savant abilities, and appears to say exactly the opposite. The study is "Routes to remembering - the brains behind superior memory", by Maguire, Valentine, Wilding and Kapur. It looks at 10 competitors in memory competitions, and explains their superior memory as being driven by training in mnemonics rather than exceptional intellectual abilities or brain differences. It states that all of the participants have trained using mnemonics for several years, and makes no mention of any of the participants saying they have synaesthesia (it does mention that one participant, presumably Tammet, had seizures as a child).
So the so-called leading expert in savants in the world has a web page citing a scientific study to say that Tammet is a savant, but he appears not to have bothered to actually read it and discover it says the opposite.
He's not the only one to have missed this. The study by Bor, Billington and Baron-Cohen says that he hasn't had explicit memory training - instead suggesting his superior memory is due to synaesthesia as he claims. Ironically, that paper actually cites the paper by Maguire, Valentine, Wilding and Kapur (the one that studied Tammet and said his abilities were explained by mnemonics), but the authors seem to have no clue that Tammet was in that study, and quote it as a study of "the normal population with superior memories resulting from extensive practice".
So in the same paper that claims that Tammet doesn't use memory strategies, they have cited a paper that says he does use memory strategies, apparently without realising it (neither papers actually mention Tammet by name). The irony.
How interesting! Tammet has been the subject of another published study? I'm going to look into it today. Thanks for the tip.
I'd love to have the time to read that book by Wilding and Valentine.
If anyone is interested, I don't dismiss a link between genuine synaesthesia and memory that is superior in some ways. I'm a synaesthete myself, and I'm sure it does go along with some enhanced cognitive features.
The quote about Tammet being studied at an Institute of Neurology in London is from the website of the Wisconsin Medical Society (not D. Treffert's own website, but Treffert is associated with this medical society). This quote was apparently originally taken from Daniel Tammet's own website "Optimnem", but it appears that the original quote can no longer be found at it's original source.
This link to the page probably wont print in full:
http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant_syndrome/savant_profiles/daniel_tammet
So, it appears that Tammet once made mention at his own website of the fact that he was in a "memory Olympics" in the year 2000, and won a gold medal. According to Joshua Foer (p. 230 in his book) Tammet won a gold medal specifically for the "names and faces" event, a fact that Tammet might have thought would look inconsistent with Professor Baron-Cohen's ideas about autistic people being faceblind, assuming Tammet is autistic. I'm speculating, of course, but I'm not making anything up.
I'm still trying to get a hold of the Nature Neuroscience paper (useless public libraries, mutter, mutter).
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