Johnnie Moore

Thinking differently

Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

I was fascinated to read about Daniel Tammet in the Grauniad. He is an autistic savant with extraordinary mathematical skills. Here’s how he processes the numbers.

Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn’t “calculating”: there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.”

It really makes you wonder what the brain is capable of, and even makes me have philosopical questions about what’s really happening when we think we are doing maths.

Share Post

More Posts

Rambling thoughts on models

I went down to Surrey on Friday for long walk and pub lunch with Neil Perkin. We’d originally planned to run a workshop about agile

Planning as drowning

Antonio Dias offers a fascinating description of what goes wrong when drowning: What separates a swimmer from someone drowning is the way a swimmer acknowledges

Leadership as holding uncertainty

Viv picks out some nice ideas from Phelim McDermott on the subject of leadership. “We love the security of the illusion that someone is in

Concreting Complexity

I’ve been thinking about the urge to scale things lately – see here and here. I understand the concern with being able to effect big

The absurd

In moving house, I radically downsized my collection of books which I can highly recommend. I used to think I’d one day find a reason

Rewriting history…

Thanks to my Improvisation friend Kelsey Flynn I rambled into a letter cited in Margaret Cho’s Blog (go to Letter #1): Lately it seems like

Who says fun is dangerous?

I wanted to share this email doing the rounds this morning… AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE After every flight Qantas pilots fill out a form called a gripe

And I thought there was only one

Suddenly there’s another John Moore marketing blog. I realise I’m a bit of an addict for this, but this latest is not mine. It’s produced

Thoughts for the day

These came to be via Tony Quinlan from Terry Tillman at 227company. “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than

More Updates

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

Johnnie Moore

Reminder

Just a reminder that Peter Hanke and Rob Poynton are running their workshop, Communication as a Performing Art on November 2nd in London. I’m going there as is Marks Earls

Johnnie Moore

Pitfalls of training

Donald Clark discovers some research that should give trainers, and those who hire them, something to worry about. He describes it in more detail, this is my crude summary: Various

Johnnie Moore

Tangential creativity

Quite a few people have pointed to John Naughton’s article: Lasers would never have shone if Mandelson had been in charge. Naughton challenges the government’s plans to restrict science funding

Johnnie Moore

Credentialism

A couple of articles have stuck in my mind recently. This one argues that safety-first playgrounds are counter-productive. The research also suggested that claims (made by the manufacturers who had