Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

Daniel has a compulsive need for order and routine -- he eats the same precise amount of cereal for breakfast every morning and cannot leave the house without counting the number of items of clothing he's wearing. When he gets stressed or is unhappy, he closes his eyes and counts. But in one crucial way Daniel is not at all like the Rain Man: he is virtually unique among people who have sev- ere autistic disorders in that he is capable of living a fully independent life. He has emerged from the "other side" of autism with the ability to function successfully -- he is even able to explain what is happening inside his head.

Born on a Blue Dayis a triumphant and uplifting story, starting from early childhood, when Daniel was incapable of making friends and prone to tantrums, to young adulthood, when he learned how to control himself and to live independently, fell in love, experienced a religious conversion to Christianity, and most recently, emerged as a celebrity. The world's leading neuroscientists have been studying Daniel's ability to solve complicated math problems in one fell swoop by seeing shapes rather than making step-by-step calculations. Here he explains how he does it, and how he is able to learn new languages so quickly, simply by absorbing their patterns. Fascinating and inspiring,Born on a Blue Dayexplores what it's like to be special and gives us an insight into what makes us all human -- our minds."A riveting account of living with autism...At times, he is quite poetic, especially when he writes about numbers...Transcends the disability-memoir genre."

--Kirkus Reviews"It was fascinating to read how the mind of a mathematical savant is both similar to and different from my visual brain. Daniel thinks in patterns of color, shapes, and relationships between numbers, instead of in photo-realistic images. This book is a must-read for anybody who is interested in how the mind works."

-- Temple Grandin, bestselling author ofAnimals in TranslationandThinking in Pictures"This is a concise book about a very expansive mind. By studying Daniel we may come closer to being able to tap the 'little Rain Man' that exists, perhaps, within us all.

Daniel has a heartfelt life mission -- serving as an inspiration for other persons, demonstrating by his own example that such conditions as epilepsy or Asperger's need not always interfere with overall development and potential. Daniel is articulate, soft-spoken, pleasant, polite, gentle, and modest. Those traits shine through in his writing, and his goals mirror most of our own -- becoming closer in our intimate relationships, and becoming closer in our relationships with family and friends as well.

Daniel says that numbers are his friends. One comes away from his book with the feeling, through his openness, candor, and reaching out, of having made a new friend as well."

-- Darold A. Treffert, MD, author ofExtraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome"The probability of someone having both synesthesia and autism is incredibly small -- about 1 in 10,000. Are Daniel's talents the result of his two rare syndromes coming together in one person? His synesthesia gives him a richly textured, multisensory form of memory, and his autism gives him the narrow focus on number and syntactic patterns. The resulting book is a story of a life that is both remarkable and inspiring."<  more >>