a byzantine machine

For most, the calculus of mind has its cold, invariable limits. Attention and repetition allow us the province of only a small set of our experiences, and most of the world's features are simply forgotten. Are these details never present? Are they instead discarded by the subconscious mind?

Some savants have a startling ability to recall experiences and facts, both vital and inane. Often these abilities are associated with a traumatic brain injury or developmental disabilities. In addition to eidetic memories, some individuals also possess prodigious cognitive abilities. Daniel Tammet is one such prodigious savant. Since the age of four, his mind has seen the world as a landscape of numbers. In grade school, Daniel would spend his recess counting the hopscotch scores of the other children. He would gaze endlessly, pondering the patterns in nature and in the lives of his peers. As a synesthesiac, each number looked and felt unique to him. Some were movements, others towering forms, and still others deep and complex feelings.

With each number a separate sensual experience, it's no wonder that Daniel can easily remember them. His recitation of pi to more than 22,000 digits astounded even those familiar with his condition. Even more remarkable are his skills of mental computation. Daniel can operate on numbers to the hundredth digit in his head. He can determine the primality of a number by feeling. He claims that the answers simply appear, without the use of a deliberate algorithm.

Daniel, like some other savants, also has an eidetic memory. In a stunt performed for a British television show, he learned to speak Icelandic, considered to be a difficult and nuanced language, in only a week. To one like Daniel, we must seem blind, deaf, absent-minded.

The present might seem almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as Jorge Luis Borges describes it in Funes the Memorious. Like Daniel Tammet, Ireneo Funes is cursed and blessed with supernal memory. His recollections are every bit as sensual as the lives of others, his days vertiginous. Borges writes of Funes: "He could continuously discern the tranquil advance of corruption, of decay, of fatigue ... He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multi-form, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world." I cannot imagine the stammering grandeur that reality would hold all at once. We can only marvel at these savants, these insomniacs among us.