The book Born on a Blue Day, by Daniel Tammet is the autobiography of a man afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome, an autistic spectrum disorder.  Daniel Tammet is best known for his savant abilities in the field of mathematics.   His most famous feat was his memorization of pi to more than 22,000 digits.  One of the main factors allowing Daniel Tammet amazing mathematical skills is his ability to synesthetically “see” numbers and to visualize mathematical equations in ways that the majority of the population can only imagine.

I am a self-proclaimed convert. Not only did I come into college with a plan to avoid technology, but I also came supplied with an over active fear of computers and all the things that go along with them. In the eyes of academia I was the perfect student to continue the tradition of clinging to my ignorance of all things new, while memorizing dead languages I would probably never use once I received my diaploma. I lacked a facebook account and had a talent for avoiding communication through email, preferring instead to correspond with my high school friends the old-fashioned way, using paper and ink. This semester, two of my classes somehow found a way to change everything.

While there are many surprising insights in Daniel J. Siegel’s The Developing Mind, I was most intrigued by how information from the brain and body combine as output to the mind. Merging class discussion with the material in this book offers two ways in which the internal processes of the brain combine with stimulus input from the body to give rise to a picture in the mind. The way discussed in class is that input from the body is supplemented by the brain before it reaches the mind, such as the filling in of the blind spots in the eye. A different way that was touched on in the book is the idea that the brain generates output to the mind that is supplemented by input from the body, such as when it looks to

Breastfeeding Limitations: Are some women incapable of breastfeeding? Are formula mothers neglectful?

The Tipping Point: telling us what we want to hear, or changing the way we see the world?