In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks wrote about two autistic men, twins who had an extraordinary relationship with numbers. Sacks recalled that during one of his sessions, a box of matches fell off a table and its contents degenerated, and the twins called out “111,” the exact number of matches lying on the floor. They later explained that they did not count the matches, but could “see” how many there were. “The twins live exclusively in a mental world of numbers,” Sacks concluded. “They have no interest in the stars that shine, or the hearts of men.”
Daniel Tammet only mentions Sacks once in his new book, Nine Minds, but the writings of the British neurologist haunt these portraits of autistic people. Like those twins, Tammet is on the autistic spectrum, can perform absurdly complex calculations in his head, and is capable of living in a “mind world of numbers,” and yet he is also a writer whose traits the contradicts frequent assumption. that autism and empathy cannot coexist in the same mind. Part literary experiment, part work of activism, his book bears an extended resemblance to the assumptions in Sacks’ chapter; he celebrates the gifts and talents of autistic people, while exploring the richness of their desires and dreams.
The subjects of this book – which include a homicide detective, a leading mathematician and a surgeon – all possess exceptional abilities: they can spot patterns, solve crimes and equations and play creatively with language. And yet their lives are characterized by great tension, a constant trade-off between gift and difficulty, clarity and bewilderment, praise and alienation, acceptance and rejection.
Tammet tells the story of Vaughan, a brilliant hand and wrist surgeon widely admired for his skill, but who cannot remember faces and struggles to make sense of what his wife tells him. He “had always been handy – he could pick up a broken vase and mend it, shard by shard, mend a hand, bone by bone. But the fragments of a mind – that was something else entirely. So hard to grasp and put back together.”
Autism presents a particular challenge to our assumptions about language. Of Dan Aykroyd, the comic actor, Tammet writes: “He did not listen to his peers on stage like the others; he settled on specific words in a sketch, either written in advance or improvised just at that moment, and on the flood of associations they started inside him.” It is not that Aykroyd, or any of Tammet’s subjects, do not listen, but that they listen and observe else. It is a quietly radical revelation that speaks to the essence of the neurodiversity movement: if there is a deficit in society, it lies not in an autistic person’s perceptual differences, but in neurotypical assumptions that govern human relationships.
Tammet himself grew up before the neurodiversity movement gained steam, and at times his book reads like a long letter to his younger self, the boy who grew up surrounded by the language of disability no different. Like a novelist, he enters his characters’ heads, and often presents himself as children; he reconstructs dialogue and shifts time and place. Rarely does he quote directly from them, and instead of the ambiguity and open-endedness of their speech, we have Tammet’s own authorial voice, the “10th mind”, whose layer lies thickly over these portraits, sometimes revealing, sometimes concealing the inner lives of his subjects.
It is now almost 40 years since Sacks wrote about those twins; since then, many writers have tried to find their own language to describe autism and free it from the case study. Tammet’s work is part of this project, and yet I was sometimes troubled by the framing of this book and its focus on praise and success: the emphasis on seeing what others do not see and solving what others cannot not solve It is a useful corrective to the history of prejudice against autistic people, and the lack of appreciation of their talents, although a focus on exceptional brilliance seems a fragile foundation on which to build a plea for tolerance.
Although his subjects are neurodiversity, their concerns and desires seem all too typically human: to be seen, loved and understood by others. I enjoyed most of those chapters that stopped to dwell on their relationships with friends, family, doctors and colleagues; the networks of care we all rely on, autistic or not.
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One of Tammet’s best portraits is that of Kana, a Japanese academic who specializes in loneliness among autistic adults. She herself felt this emotion keenly in cities, and eventually settled in Okinawa. As Tammet explains, the Okinawans have a culture of yuimaru, which translates as “look out for each other”. It may be that a language that embraces autism and difference already exists, we just need to open our ears to it.
