Born on a Blue Day

This chapter provides an account of what it was like to experience the developmental peculiarities of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), savant syndrome, and synesthesia as a young child growing up in East London. The author starts recounting the tale from the time of his mother’s late pregnancy. His parents were impoverished, patient, and lovingly devoted to their son (and eventually other children as well) according to his needs. They navigated his difficult behavior, defined largely in his earliest years by incessant crying, by calming him with soothing motions (like rocking and swinging) and enlisting the help of specialists early on.

A turning point in the author’s life came when his parents enrolled him in nursery school, where he experienced the many multisensory stimuli that it offered. He did not connect with the other children there (or his younger brother at home), but he explored the textures of the facility’s carpets, mats, and playgrounds with great interest and intensity. At home, he grew obsessed with numbers, collecting books that he couldn’t read just so that he could count the page numbers, his “numerical comfort blanket” (25).

Many of the activities the author enjoyed most as a child involved repetitive motion and silence. He would sit and immerse himself in silence in his bedroom or sit on swings or the merry-go-round in the early morning at a nearby park as his parents kept him swinging or spinning. Other stimuli he was likely to encounter around town, however—car horns, crowds—were frightening and painful.

The chapter traces the author’s life until around age five. In the final lines, he reflects that his parents’ recollections helped him write the account, and he calls them his heroes for the efforts they made and the love and patience they displayed (28).

Tammet opens with the story of a nearly fatal epileptic seizure he suffered at age four. His convulsions lasted nearly an hour, and he nearly suffocated and died before doctors stabilized his condition. Doctors diagnosed him with temporal lobe epilepsy, which Tammet says is not unusual among individuals on the autistic spectrum.

Though medication successfully prevented further seizures, the side effects included dizzy spells and drowsiness that severely impacted the author’s life and his ability to perform at school. For example, he would often fall asleep in class, and his teachers (informed and sympathetic) would make sure he was not alone as classrooms emptied and he slept on. While this condition isolated him from other students, he still did not particularly mind: “they just weren’t a part of my world” (38). Eventually, he was able to stop taking the medication, and his performance at school improved as he remained seizure-free and unmedicated.

Tammet discusses some brain science related to seizures, ASD, and savant abilities. For example, while people with typical brain and cognition functioning perceive certain things as a whole (like an image), a person on the autism spectrum might perceive it with more attention to its constituent parts and details. He illustrates this concept in the text itself. If the letter “H” is stamped several times and the group is arranged into a large letter “A,” people not on the spectrum are likely to immediately perceive the large “A,” but a brain like the author’s will likely first see the many “Hs” (40).

The author devotes space in the chapter to talking through a few theories that researchers have studied in relation to brains, epilepsy, creativity, and more. Researchers have suggested the possibility of “a link between epilepsy and creativity” (43), and indeed, the author developed a compulsion to write fiction stories when he was about eight years old. From then on, writing was an important and positive aspect of his life.