World's Smartest Man is Gay - Daniel Tammet

I was on my way to upstate New York, specifically Hyde Park to visit some of my friends at the Culinary Institue of America (CIA) a few weeks ago. I picked up an issue of The Advocate so that I can catch up on some gay news during the two-hour ride. I came across this article. Wow, my eyes were glued to the magazine as I read up on this amazing person.

Daniel Paul Tammet, a 28 year old autistic savant from the UK, gifted with a facility for mathematic problems, sequence memory, and natural language learning. He was born with congenital childhood epilepsy.

An autistic savant is a person with both autism and Savant Syndrome. Savant Syndrome describes a person having both a severe developmental or mental handicap and extraordinary mental abilities not found in most people. The Savant Syndrome skills involve striking feats of memory and often include arithmetic calculation and sometimes unusual abilities in art or music.

He can speak languages including English, French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Estonian, Icelandic, Welsh and Esperanto. Tammet is capable of learning new languages very quickly. To prove this for a Channel Five documentary, Tammet was challenged to learn Icelandic in one week, a language with a popular reputation as one of the world's most difficult languages to learn. Seven days later he appeared on Icelandic television conversing in Icelandic, with his Icelandic language instructor saying it was "not human."

And yes, he is gay. Daniel and his domestic partner, software engineer Neil Mitchell, have been together for six years. He has been teaching researchers worldwide about the complexities of the brain, but he also has a thing or two to teach us about love.

Here are some excerpts from his interview from the June 2007 issue of The Advocate:

You sound like an old fashioned romantic.
"When you love someone anything is possible, including a relationship that stands the test of time. LOVE IS GIVING YOURSELF AWAY. And you can only do that once. Otherwise you're giving away fragments of yourself."

Love is considered hard work?
"People find it very easy to fall in love, but they find it much more difficult to actually live it out. They think, It's difficult, so it mustn't be right. They'll go on to another relationship, and they'll have the easy bit again, the unconscious bit, and then they'll move on."

Relationships require heroism?
"you're opening yourself up completely to another person, and you can't know who this human being is, other than what they choose to reveal to you. Entering a relationship is very much an act of faith."

*sigh*