Daniel Tammet

Portraits, a bilingual first poetry collection, was published in 2018.

Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing, a collection of essays on language, was published in the UK, US, and France in 2017. In a review of the book for the Wall Street Journal, Brad Leithauser noted that "in terms of literary genres, something new and enthralling is going on inside his books" and that the author showed "a grasp of language and a sweep of vocabulary that any poet would envy".

Tammet's first novel, Mishenka, came out in France and Quebec in 2016.

His translation into French of a selection of poetry by Les Murray was published by L'Iconoclaste in France in 2014.

Thinking in Numbers, a collection of essays, was first published in 2012 and serialised as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in the United Kingdom.

In his book Moonwalking with Einstein (2011), the science journalist and former US Memory Champion Joshua Foer speculates that study of conventional mnemonic approaches has played a role in Tammet's feats of memory. While accepting that Tammet meets the standard definition of a prodigious savant, Foer suggests that his abilities may simply reflect intensive training using standard memory techniques, rather than any abnormal psychology or neurology per se. In a review of his book for The New York Times, psychologist Alexandra Horowitz described Foer's speculation as among the book's few "missteps", questioning whether it would matter if Tammet had used such strategies or not.

His second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was published in 2009. Allan Snyder, director of the University of Sydney Centre for the Mind, called the work 'an extraordinary and monumental achievement'. Tammet argues that savant abilities are not "supernatural" but are "an outgrowth" of "natural, instinctive ways of thinking about numbers and words". He suggests that the brains of savants can, to some extent, be retrained, and that normal brains could be taught to develop some savant abilities.

Baron-Cohen, Bor and Billington investigated whether Tammet's synaesthesia and Asperger syndrome explained his savant memory abilities in a further study published in Neurocase in 2008. They concluded that his abilities might be explained by hyperactivity in one brain region (the left prefrontal cortex), which results from his Asperger syndrome and synaesthesia. On the Navon task, relative to non-autistic controls, Tammet was found to be faster at finding a target at the local level and to be less distracted by interference from the global level. In an fMRI scan, "Tammet did not activate extra-striate regions of the brain normally associated with synaesthesia, suggesting that he has an unusual and more abstract and conceptual form of synaesthesia". Published in Cerebral Cortex (2011), an fMRI study led by Jean-Michel Hupé at the University of Toulouse (France) observed no activation of colour areas in ten synaesthetes. Hupé suggests that synaesthetic colour experience lies not in the brain's colour system, but instead results from "a complex construction of meaning in the brain, involving not only perception, but language, memory and emotion".

For his US book tour, Tammet appeared on several television and radio talk shows and specials, including 60 Minutes and the Late Show with David Letterman. In February 2007 Born on a Blue Day was serialised as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in the United Kingdom.

Mänti is a constructed language that Tammet published in 2006. The word Mänti comes from the Finnish word for "pine tree" (mänty). Mänti uses vocabulary and grammar from the Finnic languages. Some sample words include:

He was the subject of a documentary film titled Extraordinary People: The Boy with the Incredible Brain, first broadcast on the British television station Channel 4 on 23 May 2005.

In another study, Baron-Cohen and others at the Autism Research Centre tested Tammet's abilities in around 2005. Tammet was found to have synaesthesia according to the "Test of Genuineness-Revised" which tests the subjects' consistency in reporting descriptions of their synaesthesia. He performed well on tests of short term memory (with a digit-span of 11.5, where 6.5 is typical). Conversely, test results showed his memory for faces scored at the level expected of a 6- to 8-year-old child in this task. The authors of the study speculated that his savant memory could be a result of synaesthesia combined with Asperger syndrome, or it could be the result of mnemonic strategies.

He set the European record for reciting pi from memory to 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes on 14 March 2004. He revealed in a French talk show on Radio Classique on 29 April 2016, that this event was the inspiration behind Kate Bush's song "Pi" from her album Aerial.

After the World Memory Championships, Tammet participated in a group study, later published in the New Year 2003 edition of Nature Neuroscience. The researchers investigated the reasons for the memory champions' superior performance. They reported that they used "strategies for encoding information with the sole purpose of making it more memorable", and concluded that superior memory was not driven by exceptional intellectual ability or differences in brain structure.

In 2002, Tammet launched the website, Optimnem. The site offers language courses (currently French and Spanish) and has been an approved member of the UK National Grid for Learning since 2006.

He met software engineer Neil Mitchell in 2000. They lived in Kent, England, where they had a quiet life at home with their cats, preparing meals from their garden. He and Mitchell operated the online e-learning company Optimnem, where they created and published language courses.

He participated twice in the World Memory Championships in London under his birth name, placing 11th in 1999 and 4th in 2000.

Daniel "Tammet" Paul Corney FRSA (born 31 January 1979) is an English essayist, novelist, poet, translator, and autistic savant. His 2006 memoir, Born on a Blue Day, about his life with Asperger syndrome and savant syndrome, was named a "Best Book for Young Adults" in 2008 by the American Library Association Young Adult Library Services magazine. His second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France's best-selling books of 2009. His third book, Thinking in Numbers, was published on 16 August 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom and on 30 July 2013 by Little, Brown and Company in the United States and Canada. Mishenka, his first novel, was published in France and Quebec in 2016. His books have been published in over 20 languages. He was elected in 2012 to serve as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.