Seeing Words and Numbers
April 1, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Eighth-grader Jimmy Humphrey can memorize 700 words in a half-hour—-no surprise that he placed second in the Middle Tennessee Regional Spelling Bee at Belmont University on March 12, as reported in todays Tennessean.com. Humphrey, who has Asperger’s Syndrome says “’I imagine how the words are pronounced using the origin and the root,” he said. “It’s all in the mind,’” in a statement recalling Daniel Tammet’s visualization of pi to 22,514 places.
Autism may not be “all in the head,” but perhaps something of it surely is.
I have heard that Feynman, when thinking about physics, would see numbers and symbols in terms of colors and shapes, and that in his mind, it would all snap together into something wonderful.
It is something I have experienced: I write computer software for a living, and I often find that algorithm design is something that just simply flows from my mind through my fingers and onto the keyboard. These are things that I would turn over and around in my mind, putting pieces into place until it “feels right”.
Jimmy Humphrey can spell words as well as he can because their proper spelling “feels right”. He has built up a system of organizing words in his mind, based on the words’ origins; to me, it makes a great deal of sense. For example, knowing that the word “knife” is of Scandinavian origin, lets us see that the “k” is silent and that the plural would be “knives” and not “knifes”.