Check out this incredible video about some of the world's most amazing savants. It stars Daniel Tammet, who can remember and manipulate numbers in a unique way; for example, he can recite PI to over 20,000 places!
I think the most likely explanation is that his unusual brain maps numbers to his cortex so that his visual processing engine can crunch the numbers and render the result as another image. It's analogous to using a graphics processor to do regular arithmetic; it wasn't designed for that purpose, but it can do awesome parallel processsing.
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