Daniel Tammet Different Ways of Knowing Response

After watching the Ted Talk's on Daniel Tammet, I had to applaud him for the fact that even though he is a savant and autistic, he didn't seem like it. Most media portray autism stereotypical and it was refreshing to see someone like Tammet, go above that and even made a joke about how savants are thought as. Going into the Ted Talk, I really enjoyed watching and seeing how his synesthesia makes perceive things differently. When he was talking about how he sees numbers as colors and shapes, I found that very interesting. I see numbers as just numbers, not as a spectrum of colors and shapes. I also liked that he can see the numbers as art, like when he made a painting out of the number pi. Art can be found in almost anything that we can think and Tammet strives to find it in anywhere he can. I also liked his idea of what a word can mean by how it sounds. It is a concept I can get behind and that is how I usually think of words when I try to figure out what they mean. Finally, the way he broke down that poem by showing a picture of all the things described in the poem was incredible. Poems can have many different meanings from the way they are written. Tammet's way of understanding it was unique in a way by showing it in a picture that made the poem much more understandable. In my mind, because of his synesthesia, he likes to picture and visualize everything, so he can help to better understand the things to all the questions he has. I wish I could see the world as he does because he makes it seem much more interesting than I could. But I guess we all have something that makes us all unique. Maybe we all see the world differently and our art is reflective of that.