Talk:Moonwalking with Einstein
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I came here looking for some information on Ed Cooke, one of the founders of Memrise, and a central character in Foer's book. Reading the synopsis it seems like Foer was focusing on techniques and savantism, in particular Daniel Tammet, but I think his inclusion was an interesting bauble on what was an interesting narrative about a curious skill set that Foer believes is inspiring and valuable. I would like to see Ed Cooke mentioned and his Wikipedia article linked to, and I think the focus on Tammet and Peek should be downplayed as it is unfair to the book. --Thaklos (talk) 09:40, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
Here you can read the full chapter about Daniel Tammet
[edit]Chapter 10 from “Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer (Penguin)
https://simonsingh.net/2016/04/brainman/
Seeing numbers:
The more Daniel and I talked, the more his own statements began to cast doubt on his story. When I asked him on different occasions two weeks apart to describe what the number 9,412 looked like, he gave me two completely different answers. The first time he said, “There’s blue in there because it starts with a nine, and a drifting motion as well, and kind of like a sloping as well.” Two weeks later, he said after a long pause, “It’s a spotty number. There’s spots and curves as well. It’s actually a very complex number.”
After a cup of coffee and some pleasant chitchat about his life in the spotlight, I asked him again - for the third time - what the number 9,412 looked like to him. There was a flicker of recognition in his eyes before he closed them. He knew I hadn’t pulled those digits out of thin air. He put his fingers in his ears, and held them there for two very long, uncomfortable minutes of silence. “I can see it in my head. But I can’t break it down,” he said, finally.
Calendar calculation:
Calendar calculating, the only savant skill Daniel was willing to perform in front of me, turns out to be so simple that it really shouldn’t impress anyone. Savants like Kim, who can tell you the date of every Easter in the last thousand years, seem to have internalized the rhythms and rules of the calendar without explicitly understanding them. But anyone can learn them. There are several very simple calendar calculation formulas, published widely on the Internet. It only takes about an hour of practice to become fluent with them.