Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

Daniel could perform complex multiplication and division in his head, seemingly effortlessly. He could tell you if any number up to ten thousand was a prime. Most savants have just a single claim to exceptionality, a lone “island of genius,” but Daniel had a veritable archipelago. In addition to his lightning calculations, he was also a hyperpolyglot—a term used to describe the small number of people who can speak more than six languages. Daniel claimed to speak ten, and he said he learned Spanish in a single weekend. He’d even invented a language of his own called Mänti. To test his linguistic skills, the producers of Brainman flew Daniel to Iceland, and gave him one week to become conversational in Icelandic, one of the world’s most notoriously difficult languages. The talk-show host who tested him on national television at the end of the week pronounced himself “amazed.” Daniel’s tutor for the week called him a “genius” and “not human.”