Inside the minds of the misunderstood 

Author Daniel Tammet, 46, found fame two decades ago for some astounding mental feats.

A new book seeks to examine the lives of nine adults who have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

Daniel Tammet says he wrote Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum to fill a gap: what he sees as a dearth of true-life narratives about people who, like him, identify as autistic.

“It was not so long ago,” he writes, “that these lives were deemed unfit for literature.”

This is what he sets out to correct, with lyrically drawn portraits of nine adults, each diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, some of whom were initially pegged with the now-retired label of Asperger syndrome.

Tammet, who is 46 and British, found fame two decades ago for some astounding mental feats.

He can memorise long strings of numbers – including pi out to more than 22,000 places – and perform lightning-fast, big-number arithmetic in his head, where he says the numerals appear to him as uniquely shaped, sized and coloured objects (suggesting the brain condition known as synesthesia). He also has a gift for languages, claiming command of at least nine, plus the stunt he pulled off for a documentary crew where he learned enough Icelandic in only one week to make a successful appearance on a chat show in Iceland – not speaking English.

Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum.

Now recognised as a “prodigious” savant, a term psychiatry applies to those with particular mental skills so extraordinary that only about 100 people worldwide qualify for it, Tammet did not get his own diagnosis of Asperger syndrome until he was an adult. In that, he has something in common with most of the individuals he portrays in Nine Minds.

They include, among others, Vaughan Bowen, a renowned hand surgeon in Canada; Warren Hines, an English Midlands police detective who investigated 92 murder cases over seven years, with all but one ending in the killer’s conviction; Naoise Dolan, an Irish writer whose first novel attracted bids from seven publishers in Britain; and, as Tammet’s concluding portrayal, a certain “Danny,” who is gradually revealed to be the actor-comedian Dan Aykroyd.

The ensemble of nine represents a dedicated effort by Tammet to bring nuance and sympathetic insight to his subjects’ experiences of being cognitively different and misunderstood. It is clear he identifies with, for example, the confounding combination of ability and disability evidenced by the childhood memories of Cédric Villani, the French mathematician and politician who, by the age of 4, “could tell an ankylosaurus from a protoceratops, recite all the planets in the solar system, yet he did not know the word for a poodle … or the names of the seasons.”

Actors Dan Ackroyd (L) and the late John Belushi in the cult 1980 film 'The Blues Brothers. Ackroyd is the subject of a pen portrait in Daniel Tammet’s new book about autism.

There are as well frequent accounts of isolation, loneliness and bullying. The tenderness Tammet displays around these challenges suggests they also connect to his own experience. He writes about Aykroyd as a schoolboy, already exhibiting a supreme knack and impetuous tendency for reciting lines from television shows with superb fidelity. The author depicts him as not quite understanding why the dead-on impressions that seemed to erupt from him unexpectedly got laughs in the classroom, but says Aykroyd did learn it was a good thing: “For a while, maybe a few days at a time, the boys forgot to harass him at recess or to be cold towards him. They let him be.”

In return for his subjects’ willingness to trust him with their stories, Tammet is determined to be their advocate – nuanced and supportive in his narration, detailed and vivid in depicting the circumstances of each life, such that the general reader will end up rooting for all who are neurodivergent.

A skilled writer, Tammet frequently drops the stance of detached narrator to adopt the perspective of his subjects, looking out at their worlds from inside, as it were, imagining their thoughts and embodying their joy, their fear, their moments of relief. The effort involves invented dialogue and layer upon layer of sensory detail – colour and texture, tone and temperature. Such conceits are intended to enhance readability and are standard in the genre of narrative nonfiction, into which this book falls. But when it comes to depicting someone else’s world, there can be such a thing as too much familiarity, too much intimate knowledge, to be convincing, and that is a weakness in Nine Minds.

Author Daniel Tammet.

Consider that Aykroyd is the one subject Tammet reports he did not interview for his book, and the interior world he depicts for Aykroyd loses something.

There is also the matter of whom Tammet chooses to write about. By virtue of their talents, eight of his subjects have been successful at something and publicly recognised for it. They are people you can find online, which is how the author discovered most of them. Indeed, there is something to be said for celebrating their accomplishments as he does, to persuade the public to see autism, as Tammet argues, “less in terms of disorder, a problem to be solved, and more as a natural cognitive difference”. And that difference, as his stories demonstrate, can manifest as unique talent and beneficial insight.

But we want to be careful about this focus on giftedness and autism, because not everybody who is autistic can be described that way. Roughly 40 per cent are intellectually disabled, many living profoundly circumscribed lives, incapable of self-care, spoken language or seeing the danger in oncoming traffic, an open flame or a malicious adult.

These were and are the people whose stories, to borrow Tammet’s phrase, have proved “unfit for literature” – not most of the men and women he portrays in his book, who likely would not have merited a diagnosis until the criteria were profoundly loosened over the last generation. In Nine Minds, it is only a man named Billy who was given a diagnosis early, before turning 5, back in the early 1990s. And that is because his autism is of that most challenging kind that does not get much time in the spotlight. He paints, but no one’s calling him a prodigy. Tellingly, it was not Billy’s name Tammet found on the internet, but that of his advocate mother, and it is mostly her perspective that Tammet takes on to tell Billy’s story, as Billy is mostly nonverbal. But at least Billy is there. No genius, but a person. One who is loved. Good for Tammet for finding room for him.