The subject of intense media attention from around the world, Tammet is unique in his ability to articulate his savant experience. He describes his visual experience of numbers as complex shapes with colour, texture and motion. Thirty-seven, for instance, is lumpy like porridge, while eighty-nine reminds him of falling snow.

Virtually unique amongst people who have severe autistic disorders, Tammet is capable of living a fully independent life. His incredible self-awareness and ability to communicate what it feels like to live in a unique way is the subject of his powerful memoir, Born on a Blue Day, hailed by one reviewer as filled with "some of the clearest prose this side of Hemingway."

Daniel Tammet came to worldwide prominence as the subject of the award-winning documentary Brainman, which showed him reciting Pi from memory to 22,514 digits, beating the house at blackjack in Las Vegas, and being given the challenge to learn a new language—Icelandic—from scratch in just seven days, before an interview in Reykjavik.

Tammet has been studied extensively by scientists at both California's Center for Brain Studies and at the Cambridge Autism Research Centre. He has welcomed such attention, hoping that it might offer new insight into how to successfully treat people with autism spectrum disorders. As ABC News says, "One might say Tammet has come back from the country of autism, which is a very difficult place for researchers and for parents to reach."

Daniel Tammet can perform incredible feats of calculation, learn a new language in a matter of days, and visualize numbers in a way that is wholly unique and utterly fascinating to cognitive scientists. Yet his greatest accomplishments may be the ones that most of us take for granted: moving out of his parents' home; supporting himself; having a long-term relationship. As one of the world's only high-functioning autistic savants leading a relatively normal life, he offers incredible insight into the world of autism, Asperger's syndrome, and other severe cognitive impairments. One of his life's goals is to make the world a more welcoming place for people with such disabilities, and he challenges us to think about how society treats those who are different, and what tolerance and understanding really mean. His talks offer an unprecedented opportunity to explore the human mind in all of its wonder and complexity. In the end, he affirms that what binds us all in our humanity may in fact be the very differences we often try so hard to ignore.