Synesthesia – a Different Way of Knowing

THIS is the breathtaking story of Daniel Tammet. A thirty-something with extraordinary mental abilities, 

Tammet is one of fewer than a hundred “prodigious savants” according to Dr. Darold Treffert, the world’s leading researcher in the study of savant syndrome. (Wikipedia)

He can do calculations to 100 decimal places in his head, and learn a language in a week. Tammet holds the European record for reciting pi from memory to 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes on 14 March 2004.

Tammet has reportedly learned ten languages, including Romanian, Gaelic, Welsh, and Icelandic that he learned in a week for a TV documentary.

He also met with the world famous  “megasavant,” Kim Peek (November 11, 1951 – December 19, 2009), the man who inspired Dustin Hoffman’s character in the Oscar winning film ‘Rain Man’.

This the complete original 47 min. documentary which also follows Daniel as he travels to America to meet the scientists who are convinced he may hold the key to unlocking similar abilities in others.

The Boy with the
Incredible Brain

“There is a sort of conscious telegraphic communication going on incessantly, day and night, between the physical brain and the inner man. The brain is such a complex thing, both physically and metaphysically, that it is like a tree whose bark you can remove layer by layer, each layer being different from all the others, and each having its own special work, function, and properties.”
– H. P. Blavatsky, (Transactions)

“Memory has no seat, no special organ of its own in the human brain,” Blavatsky wrote in Psychic & Noetic Action — it has seats in every organ of the body. The seat of memory, then, is assuredly neither here nor there, but everywhere throughout the human body.”

Body of Work

A musician needs his instrument, a painter her canvas. This requirement of a physical material vehicle is explained in The Secret Doctrine‘s first Fundamental Proposition: “…it is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as ‘I am I,’

a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity.”

A central nervous system connected to a physical brain and body are indispensable to complete our human evolutionary experience. Just as the invisible “zeros and ones” of a digital software program, for example, must be connected to a physical computer or they cannot be read or used.

Any variations in brain and intention will invariably alter how our inner intelligence is expressed, which also opens up numerous possibilities for our most important evolution, our future spiritual development.

As William Q. Judge wrote in The Ocean of Theosophy: “By living according to the dictates of the soul the brain may at least be made porous to the soul’s recollections; if the contrary sort of a life is led, then more and more will clouds obscure that reminiscence.”