Embracing the Wide Sky

by Daniel Tammet, 2009

In this sequel to Born on a Blue Day, Daniel Tammet shares research findings about the human brain and muses about how his brain and that of other savants might be similar to, or different from, an ordinary brain.  The book was interesting, and I enjoyed reading it, but I liked it less than Born on a Blue Day because it’s less about Tammet and more about brains. I’m very interested in brains, but I already knew some of what is in this book (not all, certainly!), about learning language and why it doesn’t make sense to play the lottery; still, the chapters on math (“The Number Instinct” and “Thinking by Numbers” were new to me and interesting, although I couldn’t always follow the explanations!

 

Listen to Daniel Tammet talk about this book at http://youtu.be/fIDMCC2SJek

I’m Back!

I haven’t posted in a while…. It wasn’t that I wasn’t reading, exactly. I read a lot of French books this year because I made a trip to France in December and I wanted to dust off my rusty French. I read lots of Simenon novels, and also some essays. While I was in France, I bought the latest book by my friend Vincent Courtillot, Nouveau Voyage au Centre de la Terre, and I read that. Somehow, I never found the time to post about what I was reading. But my summer vacation is beginning now, and I went to the public library yesterday and came home with four books from my non-fiction reading list. I’ve already begun the first one: Daniel Tammet’s Embracing the Wide Sky.  I hope to be posting about that soon.