Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind [Hardcover]

Daniel Tammet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 2009

Owner of "the most remarkable mind on the planet," (according to Entertainment Weekly) Daniel Tammet captivated readers and won worldwide critical acclaim with the 2007 New York Times bestselling memoir, Born On A Blue Day, and its vivid depiction of a life with autistic savant syndrome. In his fascinating new book, he writes with characteristic clarity and personal awareness as he sheds light on the mysteries of savants' incredible mental abilities, and our own.

Tammet explains that the differences between savant and non-savant minds have been exaggerated; his astonishing capacities in memory, math and language are neither due to a cerebral supercomputer nor any genetic quirk, but are rather the results of a highly rich and complex associative form of thinking and imagination. Autistic thought, he argues, is an extreme variation of a kind that we all do, from daydreaming to the use of puns and metaphors.

Embracing the Wide Sky combines meticulous scientific research with Tammet's detailed descriptions of how his mind works to demonstrate the immense potential within us all. He explains how our natural intuitions can help us to learn a foreign language, why his memories are like symphonies, and what numbers and giraffes have in common. We also discover why there is more to intelligence than IQ, how optical illusions fool our brains, and why too much information can make you dumb.

Many readers will be particularly intrigued by Tammet's original ideas concerning the genesis of genius and exceptional creativity. He illustrates his arguments with examples as diverse as the private languages of twins, the compositions of poets with autism, and the breakthroughs, and breakdowns, of some of history's greatest minds. Embracing the Wide Sky is a unique and brilliantly imaginative portrait of how we think, learn, remember and create, brimming with personal insights and anecdotes, and explanations of the most up-to-date, mind-bending discoveries from fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology and linguistics. This is a profound and provocative book that will transform our understanding and respect for every kind of mind.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In 2004, autistic savant Tammet reeled off 22,514 digits of pi from memory, setting a European record. How did he achieve such a feat? Is an autistic mind different from others? Yes and no, Tammet answers in this follow-up to his bestselling memoir, Born on a Blue Day. His own brain may be wired a little differently, but we are all capable of remarkable mental feats, he asserts. Tammet seamlessly blends science and personal experience in a powerful paean to the mysteries and beauty of the brain. Intelligence is a complex phenomenon that synthesizes various skills and abilities. Tammet illustrates this with his own abilities in memory, language and number sense. For example, he points out that his extraordinary memory for numbers is augmented by the unusual way in which my mind perceives numbers as complex, multi-dimensional, coloured and textured that allowed him to compose something like a visual song. Tammet concludes that all humans have something unique to contribute to the world, and he himself has a gift for rendering science accessible and even delightful. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Autistic savant Tammet's follow-up to his 2007 New York Times best-selling memoir, Born on a Blue Day, delves into the vast array of human understanding and how our brains work. Drawing on personal experience as well as on scientific research, he creates the equivalent of a good college lecture series, with the narrative generating interest as it develops. This smooth audio abridgment benefits from British actor Daniel Gerroll's narration, which renders the prosaic material intriguing. Recommended for public libraries with large audiobook collections. [Audio clip available through audio.simonandschuster.com; an alternate recording, with John Keating reading, is available from Recorded Books.—Ed.]—Lisa Powell Williams, Moline P.L., IL
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1 edition (January 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416569693
• ISBN-13: 978-1416569695
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #485,177 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Daniel Tammet is a writer, linguist and educator. A 2007 poll of 4,000 Britons named him as one of the world's "100 living geniuses." His website company, Optimnem, has provided foreign language instruction to thousands around the globe and his last book, the New York Times bestseller Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, has been translated into 18 languages. He lives in Avignon, in the south of France.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "the treasures deep within us", January 18, 2009

By 

Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind (Hardcover)

Daniel Tammet's first book, Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, provides a fascinating insight into a mind that understood numbers much better than it understood people. His second book provides amazing insights into our own minds.

Tammet's book is based on wonderfully detailed and lucid descriptions of research on how people think. He then applies his learning to every day experiences to show how less gifted people like me can apply that research in a practical way.

For example, in one chapter he analyzes the issue of information overload and attempts to cope with it, including recent studies showing that multi-tasking is not really very effective. He is eloquent on the "beauties" of the Dewey Decimal System, and concludes:

"Dewey's system is a marvel of organization, but I have given detailed examples here in order to make an important philosophical as well as practical point. Information is meaningless unless it can be made sense of, and to do that it requires an internal system of thought and ideas that can provide context and relate it to other information we have already learned.

"Many people lack a coherent worldview with which they can evaluate and assimilate new information. The problem of information overload, therefore, may not be the quantity of it but our inability to know what to do with it. One possible explanation for this is the common confusion between information and ideas. In his book, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking, history professor Theodore Roszak makes the point that the mind thinks with ideas, not information. Ideas are of primary importance because they define, make sense of, and create information. Roszak goes further still by arguing that the greatest ideas, such as the Founding Fathers' "all men are created equal," do not contain any information at all. Rather, such ideas are the result of an innate human sensibility that reaches beyond strings of data to recognize and synthesize transcendent patterns of thought. A personal worldview then helps put information back into perspective, giving it an intuitive place in our minds like the books in a library."

Tammet maintains a wonderfully informative website called Optimnem where he explores his (and our) minds. This book is the best self help book for the brain I've ever read; I've enjoyed every minute I've spent reading his writing.

Robert C. Ross 2009

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why you think the way you do, January 23, 2009

By 

PT Cruiser "PT Cruiser" (CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

I didn't read Daniel Tammet's first book, Born on a Blue Day (yet) but this book was one of the most fascinating and informative books about the way the human mind works that I've ever read. Daniel Temmet is an autistic savant and talks in this book about how similar autistic and non-autistic minds function. It gave me a whole new perspective on how we learn, remember and process thoughts.

It was particularly helpful to me in understanding how we learn language since I've been learning French for the past 10 years and more recently Italian. It's much more involved than I previously thought but I also came away with the idea that it's possible to learn several languages and be able to function in each of them. According to research it's believed that when a person learns more than one language as a baby and small child, both languages occupy the same small section of the brain, but when learning a second or third language, they are kept in a separate section of the brain. This makes sense since little kids can often go back and forth between languages whereas when I try to switch I can almost feel my brain opening another "compartment".

He discusses IQ tests and IQ and disputes where they can actually measure intelligence. There is a whole section on how the human brain processes information and how we remember things. We often hear that our brains are like computers, just processing information but he shows how they are so much more intricate than even the most advanced computers. There are studies showing that babies can count and he discusses arguments that a "number module" exists within the human brain.

There is so much fascinating information packed into this book and Tammet's writing style makes it all so interesting and not at all a dry subject. I had a hard time putting it down and read the book in two days. The only thing I wish, is that there was a little more about the way his brain processes subjects and information discussed in this book. But from what I understand, his first book, Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant goes more deeply into this. It's a book that I definitely want to read after reading this one.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The miracle and mystery of the human mind, January 16, 2009

By 

Julie Neal (Sanibel Island, Fla.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind (Hardcover)

Autistic savant author Daniel Tammet clearly has a beautiful mind, but the real focus of this important book is the boundless ability of EVERY human brain, "the treasures buried deep within us all." Tammet argues convincingly that the differences between a savant and an average person are not really so great. He debunks myths about savants, many due to the movie Rain Man, that seem to rob the humanity from these rare people. After several chapters explaining how his own mind works, he gives tips on how everyday brains can improve their functioning.

Tammet shows how IQ testing does not show the true intelligence of a person, and is inherently flawed. He agrees with Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, and shows that when schools espouse this view, student's grades improve.

I found it fascinating to learn that Tammet has trouble remember faces, but numbers are alive for him. "In my head, numbers assume complex shapes that interact to form solutions to sums," he explains. "I do not know where my number shapes come from. I do not know why I think of 6 as tiny and 9 as very large or why threes are round and fours pointy."

Peeking in on such a mind is an interesting experience; I highly recommend it!

Here's the chapter list:
1. Wider Than the Sky
2. Measuring Minds: Intelligence and Talent
3. Seeing What is Not There
4. A World of Words
5. The Number Instinct
6. The Biology of Creativity
7. Light to Sight
8. Food for Thought
9. Thinking by Numbers
10. The Future of the Mind