I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane

What did Vladimir Nabokov see in the first verses of Pale Fire? Was it "weathered wood" or "polished ebony"? As a synesthete, his perception of words, letters and numbers was always tainted with a certain color. Synesthesia, the leak of a sensation into another, is a relatively rare condition. It was known to be more frequent among artists, such as the composer Alexander Scriabin or the painter David Hockney, but it turns out that it might also be frequent among autists. This might even be the reason that some of them have a savant syndrome (a phenomenon first popularized by the movie Rain Man).

One of those autistic savants, Daniel Tammet explains in the video below how he sees the world and how this allows him to carry out extraordinary intellectual tasks.

In his talk, Daniel Tammet explains how he performs a multiplication by analogical thinking. Because he sees a pattern in the numbers, he gives the problem another interpretation, another meaning, where the solution is effortless. This would happen at the level of the semantic representation (i.e. when the brains deciphers...