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Daniel Tammet: the Boy with the Incredible Story
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Lili Marlene
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where biography meets neuroscience, where biography meets nonsense
18 comments:
Very interesting. I haven't heard of this article before. While I can't get hold of a copy myself, by googling for the words I did find this other article from the People newspaper with similar claims, written in January 2005.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Brain+Man!%3A+Fit+at+age3+turns+Dan+into+whiz+who+can+add+like+a...-a0127912950
On their own, neither the Sun nor the People article proves an inconsistency in Tammet's account, because one very real possibility is that these newspapers are reporting information that is poorly sourced and just incorrect. Both are sensationalist tabloid newspapers with a poor reputation for journalism. So I think to make any firm conclusions it would be necessary to dig deeper and find where this information comes from, and ideally find something from Tammet himself commenting on his face memory.
Looking at the timetable of events, it appears Tammet was diagnosed with Autism by Baron-Cohen in early 2005, quite shortly before the Brainman documentary was broadcast. Up until that point, Tammet claimed to be a "non-autistic savant" on his website. The People article is from January 2005 and mentions nothing about autism; presumably this was before his diagnosis.
It could be that he was claiming good face memory until his encounter with Baron-Cohen in 2005. This would suggest that it is possible there might be other sources from 2004 or earlier that might claim an excellent face memory, consistent with his account of being a "non-autistic savant" at that point.
Mr Anonymous
Thanks for the link, Mr Anon, much appreciated. There is a pattern here. If I develop an obsession with collecting pre-2005 Daniel Tammet information you will partly be to blame!
I'm aware that these are trashy publications, but the claims about the face recognition came from somewhere, and the most obvious common source would be Tammet himself. Was Tammet being managed by a PR company at the time when these article were researched? He certainly is managed by one these days. It is conceivable that a publicist could have made up the stuff about the face memory, if he had one then.
I could speculate about why these claims were made. I guess as a response to doing well in the names and faces event in the WMC he might make such claims. Do you know whether Corney did much better at this event than at the other tests in the memory competition? Links to archives of WMC records that I find go dead and info about some older records seems to be hard to access. If Corney showed a particular skill at this event, it could indicate a real natural talent in face recognition. The concept of the super-recognizer does have a scientific basis (Google the paper by Russell, Duchaine and Nakayama). Face recognition actually does work in the same way as a savant skill, and I know of one blogger who has argued that super recognizers are savant-like in that they have a skill that appears independent of other intellectual abilities. It involves a specific part of the brain, and if it goes offline an otherwise very intelligent person can lose the ability to recognize faces, and it can apparently also be naturally hyper-developed.
If Tammet did exceptionally well in the the names and faces test thru training, I'm sure some face recognition researchers would like to know how. Did he discover a way to cheat the test of face memory, or did he discover a way to boost face recognition ability thru training. If the latter is true it would presumably be applicable to treating prosopagnosia.
The question of Tammet's face memory ability is important for many reasons. His case as an autistic person with a face memory impairment has lent high-profile support to Baron-Cohen's ideas about autsm and face-blindness, ideas which have NOT been consistently supported by other studies. Tammet as a prosopangosic or a super-recognizer synaesthete is also scientifically interesting. There have been reports of people who have both syn and prosopagnosia, but no one seems to know if these are independent. There is also a website titled "Am I a super-recognizer" which explores apparent causal links between synaesthesia and superior face memory, which could have implications for understanding a form of dementia that specifically affects the visual parts of the brain at the rear.
Of course, if Tammet isn't really autistic or isn't really a synaesthete that would be big news, considering the number of scientists who have uncritically cited his case in their discussions and research. Scientists should be hugely interested in this, but I suspect that many are happy to just "go with the flow" and accept every bit of nonsense that Baron-Cohen comes up with.
I've reached the point where I consider Tammet dishonest, and a while ago I reached the point of having no confidence in Baron-Cohen's judgement or his science, who is the other major figure in this story. Unlike some others who are interested in this case, I dont have a lot of doubt that Tammet is a synaesthete, considering that synaesthesia is a common condition, and would not necessarily have been obvious to Maguire et al, as synaesthetes are certainly not uniformly freaks or savants. I'm a synaesthete, as are some of my family members, and if feels perfectly ordinary to us.
And another thing; Tammet presumably having both synaesthesia and autism does not make him questionable or a freak. Baron-Cohen has pushed the idea that both are rare conditions that are independent of each other, which is complete bullshit. Synaesthesia is a common condition (when one counts all the many different types of syn, not just 1 or 2 types) and autism is just as common as your definition of it is loose. Every second Aussie Mum thinks she has a son with autistic traits. And the two conditions are not independent. I have been compiling a list of famous synaesthetes for years, and it is full of people who have odd characteristics which could be seen as autistic traits.
It is perhaps interesting that Tammet and the confirmed synaesthete novelist Nabokov are/were both non-drivers. Nabokov was apparently driven places by his wife. I wonder if there is any evidence that goes against this element of Tammet's story?
And for heaven's sake, go read the 2007 journal paper in Neurocase by Bor, Billington and Baron-Cohen! They did an fMRI on Tammet, and the findings indicated that there was no synaesthesia going on, but there was brain activity consistent with a well-known technique used by memory experts and chess players with high expertise - chunking. The authors attempts to preserve the idea that Tammet isn't a con by explaining away their findings are extraordinary and unscientific. I find their assertions that Tammet has some unusual, conceptual type of synaesthesia that acts like chunking to be throughly unconvincing. I do believe that syaesthesia can enhance memory, but not in this way, and not involving the parts of the brain that are implicated in the Neurocase study.
Lots of interesting stuff! You ask about his performance in the world memory championship; these are not easy to find on the internet but are available on memocamp.com.
He competed in the championships in 1999 and 2000, coming 12th and 4th overall. His best position in the 10 individual events was in the names and faces event, in which he came 4th in 1999 and 1st in 2000.
Looking at the all time world rankings, he ranks 25th in the hour numbers event (number of digits memorised in an hour), showing that he is a genuine world class performer at memorising numbers. He ranks 43rd of all time in the names and faces event. In all other events he ranks lower, and comes in at 97th in overall ranking.
His competition results show he has a genuinely world class memory, but there is no particularly unusual pattern to his results, which are comparable to the trained memorisers he competed with. His best two events as the hour numbers (which we would expect given his claims) and the names and faces (which we wouldn't). He has lower, but still reasonably impressive, scores in the other events, such as in memorising playing cards.
Couldn't agree more on your reading of the 2007 paper by Bor, Billington and Baron-Cohen. I'm no expert, but their conclusions seem absurd to me. Despite fmri results that appear to be consistent with no synaesthesia, they don't even discuss that as a possibility.
The general idea that synaesthesia might help with memory is plausible, although I don't think it is of much help for people with trained memories. This is for two reasons.
Firstly, if synaesthesia were a great help in memory, we would expect to see a disproportionate number of people reporting synaesthesia in the upper ranks of competitors in memory competitions and similar. I don't think there is any evidence of this. Many competitors have published books describing their techniques, and I'm not aware of any mentioning synaesthesia.
Secondly, you don't need to have synaesthesia to associate colours and other features to numbers to help with remembering them - anyone can assign a colour to a number as a mnemonic aid. Indeed use of colour and similar associations are standard memory techniques. For example, Jonathan Hancock, 1994 memory champion, describes the number 0 as being "hollow, round", and the number 4 as being "hard and metallic" and 7 as "wet and soggy", but this isn't because he has synaesthesia - he has learned these associations as part of his memory system.
Many thanks for the informative answer.
I could propose a synaesthesia-related explanation of why those two events are Tammet's strongest. Grapheme-colour synaesthesia could possibly aid memorizing numbers, and this type of synaesthesia could also be related to superior face memory ability, because both face recognition and grapheme-colour synaesthesia, and colour processing in general and number recognition, all happen in the same part of the brain, the fusiform gyrus. Tammet could have a combination of a naturally great fusiform gyrus and a dedication to memory training. We might never know the truth.
Housework and kids impinge on real life (only kidding). How I love to clear out the compost bin!
I guess you aren't a synaesthete, Mr Anon?
Anon wrote:
"Firstly, if synaesthesia were a great help in memory, we would expect to see a disproportionate number of people reporting synaesthesia in the upper ranks of competitors in memory competitions and similar. I don't think there is any evidence of this. Many competitors have published books describing their techniques, and I'm not aware of any mentioning synaesthesia."
Some synaesthetes don't tell the world that they have synaesthesia simply because they don't realise that the way they think is not entirely normal. They don't know that they have it. Have a look at this brief New Scientist article about two studies that turned up synaesthesia in supposed non-synaesthetes:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14841-do-we-all-have-some-synaesthetic-ability.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news7_head_dn14841
I can personally vouch for the fact that synaesthesia can be far from obvious to even the synaesthete. I never thought that I had colours for the days of the week or all the months of the year till I sat down and recorded whatever colour I thought of for them, then repeated it quite some time later and found that the associations were identical. For me, many of my synaesthesia experiences are found in the borderland between conscious awareness and unconscious functioning, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
"...anyone can assign a colour to a number as a mnemonic aid."
Yes, but that in itself takes mental effort. For a synaesthete this is effortless, hard to resist even.
There is a possibility that is often overlooked in discussions of synaesthesia and memory. This is the plausible idea that it might not be the synaesthesia experience that aids memory, but the brain differences that underlie the synaesthesia might be the reason for better performance. Synaesthesia is associated with brain hyperconnectivity in specific areas, which is seen as an enhancement. There is quite a consistent picture in research emerging of synaesthesia linked to better memory in functions affected by the synaesthesia.
I would love to see a research study of memory champions by top class synaesthesia researchers who are able to test and interrogate for the full range of different types of synaesthesia. If synaesthesia is actually under-represented that would be interesting.
You guess right I'm not a synaesthete! I do have a background in memory training.
It would be interesting as you suggest to investigate memory champions to see if they might have some subtle levels of synaesthesia that hasn't yet come to light.
At present, although many memory champions have written detailed accounts of their techniques (for example, all three of the people who beat Tammet in 2000 have written books describing their mental imagery in detail), none have mentioned experiencing synaesthesia to my knowledge. So it would seem unlikely that people relying heavily on synaesthesia (in the way that Solomon Shereshevskiy appeared to do) are typical for memory competitors.
There is a spectrum of synaesthesia so, as you say, it could be that subtle degrees of synaesthesia are there, and more research would be needed to investigate that.
The overwhelming message from reading the published accounts of top memorisers is that they had completely normal memories before they started training in memory techniques. This is also what is reported in the "routes to remembering" study which studied 10 top memorisers. This comes as a surprise to many people who expect top competitors to have something unusual about them, whether autism, synaesthesia, or something else.
"The overwhelming message from reading the published accounts of top memorisers is that they had completely normal memories before they started training in memory techniques."
Yes but.....I would think if memory champions wished to promote their books about memory techniques to a general readership, they might tend to downplay any natural talent that they might have bought to the task, in order to make it sound like anyone can be a memory champ. I guess you know that in Tammet's second autobiography he claimed to have an IQ of 150, which is very high? In that same book he pushed the popular message that there is a genius in everyone, and it's just a matter of application, which I thought was a dishonest or stupid thing for a person with an IQ of 150 to write.
I can identify three things about memory champions that set them apart from the general population. Firstly, they are mostly male. Secondly, they are what a researcher might call a self-selected sample. Each chose to try it for some reason or reasons, which could point towards some way in which the group is atypical. Thirdly, they "see things" in their mind's eye more than average people do, as most synaesthetes do, and they use techniques that seem to be a lot like some types of natural synaesthesia.
It would be interesting to know whether IQ scores could be altered by memory training.
I've had another thought re Tammet and that study of memory experts that was published in Nature Neuroscience. I haven't been able to find anything in the study to indicate that they found anything out of the ordinary about Tammet compared to the other memory competition veterans, but I believe that is how the study would have been intended to have been conducted. In all kinds of studies in medical-psychological subjects, there is a general practice or excluding subjects who are in any way different, freakish, non-standard or diseased. There were no females in this study, and that is no coincidence. Many medical studies exclude females and children for the sake of simplifying the data. There is also a culture of excluding outliers, which are data points that lie well outside of the normal range. It is also the usual practice in medical/psychological studies to exclude any subjects, control or non-control, who have any neurological or psychiatric condition other than what is being studied. Some researchers will even do their own testing on subjects with the aim of identifying and excluding sickies or wierdos from their study. So it is possible that if Tammet had been obviously a synaesthete or different, they might have simply dropped him from the study. I believe he came actually close from being excluded from the study:
"All participants were healthy at the time of scanning....one was reported to have had seizures in childhood that resolved at puberty without recurrence." I'll bet they would have excluded any current epileptics from the study, with no regard for any interesting stuff that they might have found about an individual. In general, scientific studies aren't about discovering freakish individuals, they're about discovering the characteristics of tightly specified groups, and then (over)generalising to the rest of the population.
As you say, top memory competitors are a self-selected sample. As with any competitive sport, we would expect that if anything gave people an edge - whether it is high IQ, apergers, synaesthesia, then people with these characteristics would be overrepresented among the top competitors. Also, people with certain characteristics could be drawn to an interest in memory training in the first place. And there is certainly a lot of interest - among memory competitors themselves, as well as the general public - about what might give particular competitors an edge.
With that in mind, lets take a look at the profile of actual memory competitors. Many of them do fit a certain stereotype that might be associated with the autism spectrum (introverted males with narrow geeky interests). But there is a fair amount of variety. While most competitors are male, there are women who have made it to the very highest level (two out of the all time top ten are female). Nelson Dellis, the current top US memoriser, does stuff in his spare time like climbing up Everest. Joshua Foer, the journalist, describes how he went from "normal" to US memory champion in a year or so with the right coaching. And so on.
Obviously, you would expect that top memorisers would be more intelligent than the average. But even the evidence for that is weak. The "Routes to Remembering" study includes measures of verbal IQ and matrix reasoning. For verbal IQ, the performance of the superior memorisers was virtually indistinguishable from the controls; for matrix reasoning, the superior memorisers did slightly better, with at least one of them getting a significantly higher score. Overall, there is not much evidence of high IQ being a decisive factor in superior memory. This is consistent with the fact that the memory champions don't, in general, have exceptionally good academic records.
As an aside, it would be interesting to know where Tammet's figure for an IQ of 150 is from. It doesn't look very consistent with the "Routes to Remembering" results, and it's not quoted in any of the papers on Tammet.
You ask if IQ scores could be improved by memory training. Some IQ tests include a test of digit span as one of the measures, and digit span can be hugely increased by training. So the answer to the question "can memory training increase IQ test scores" is, I believe, a conclusive yes. Of course, whether a trained memory improves general intelligence is a different question.
Mr Anon
As you say, researchers often exclude unusual subjects and outliers from their studies. However, this wouldn't have made much sense for the "Routes to remembering" study, because the whole point was that it was studying outliers - i.e. people with exceptional memories. If the researchers had had, say, 15 subjects approaching them, 5 of whom they excluded because they showed signs of some condition (epilepsy, autism, etc), this would completely invalidate one of their central conclusions that "exceptional memory is not driven by ... structural brain differences" - because they would have excluded the subjects most likely to show such differences.
The usual interpretation of the "Routes to remembering" study is that exceptional memories are made, not born, in line with the title of this paper by Anders Ericsson here:
http://163.238.8.180/~sekerina/MEM2004/Ericsson_Exceptional_Memories_2003.pdf
"Overall, there is not much evidence of high IQ being a decisive factor in superior memory. This is consistent with the fact that the memory champions don't, in general, have exceptionally good academic records."
As a parent of kids who have been classified as intellectually gifted by our local state school system, I'm obliged to point out that high IQ or giftedness is not always associated with a top academic record, in fact some of these kids become so alienated from the education system that they rebel or disengage and underachieve. I speak from bitter experience! However I think I agree with you that this study's findings seem to suggest that the superior memorizers are bright but not intellectually gifted, as a group, and the things at which they did do better than the controls could be put down to memory training. Lovely to see that the researchers continued a fine old tradition in psychology research of using a control group who are smarter than average, with their mean IQ of 112, and therefore don't really represent the average person in the street. Were the control group white psychology students? Bet they were.
More about source of info about Tammet's IQ later.
"one of their central conclusions that "exceptional memory is not driven by ... structural brain differences""
But I don't think they tried to measure white matter in the brain, would I be right? They found no changes? differences? in grey matter volume in the superior memorizers, but I don't think that would imply that there is no synaesthesia in the SMs, because the type of synaesthesia that Tammet is supposed to have, grapheme-colour synaesthesia is associated with more coherent WHITE matter. As far as I can tell, this study wouldn't have picked up such a differnce. I think you need a special type of imaging to see white matter, but I'm no scientist!
"As an aside, it would be interesting to know where Tammet's figure for an IQ of 150 is from. It doesn't look very consistent with the "Routes to Remembering" results, and it's not quoted in any of the papers on Tammet."
The source of this info is Tammet's 2nd autobiography Embracing the Wide Sky, Hodder & Stoughton paperback edition, first published in 2009, pages 38-41. Tammet wrote that the test was "supervised by a qualified educational psychologist, the test being the WAIS, and his score was 150. 150 is well into the gifted range. I guess the testing could have been done any time up to when Tammet sent off the manuscript for this book, probably later than 2007 when 2 of the papers were published.
"There is a spectrum of synaesthesia so,....."
Actually, I think this idea has never been properly researched or substantiated, and I also think the popular idea that some people have "severe" and intrusive synaesthesia might be largely based on the accounts of Daniel Tammet, which might not be entirely reliable. As I've written before, many, perhaps most synaesthetes feel that their own experiences are "normal" and some don't realize that their own experiences are not typical and are "a thing".
There are claims that some people have sensory overload experiences that impact on their daily life negatively, and such experiences are some times categorized as extreme synaesthesia, but I think at least some of these cases could be miscategorization. Frankly, I find some of these claims to be hard to believe.
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