Idiot Savant

Kim Peek died on December 19th, at his home in Salt Lake City. He was an Idiot Savant and the inspiration for the movie Rain Man. He was 58 years old.

ScientificAmerican.com is the place to go for more information. However, in the meantime, one might remember this about Kim.

During his lifetime, he learned 9,000 books by heart.

He read a page in 8 to 10 seconds and never forgot it.

He could identify hundreds of classical compositions, with all of the information about them and about their composers. In recent years, he learned to play many of these compositions on the piano.

Yet.......he could not button his coat.

MRI's showed that he lacked a corpus callosum, the nerve tissue that normally connects the left and right halves of the brain. Maybe this allowed the two hemispheres to function like one giant hemisphere.

He had a recorded IQ of 87.. far below normal.. but IQ was probably not a good test of his kind of intelligence.

He was not autistic.. but rather he was outgoing and likable.. especially since the debut of the Rain Man movie. Before that time, he was rather reclusive.

Kim liked Shakespeare and Mozart, and who could fault him on that.

Check out the writings of Darold A. Treffert and Daniel D. Christensen, who studied Kim for years.

His large head has been compared to that of Mozart's, and who knows, perhaps if he had tried, he could have composed music.

It seems to me that Kim was a pilot for the next evolutionary step by man. It's a shame he didn't live a longer life so he could be studied more. I wonder if his brain will be preserved, as was Einstein's.

My grandfather always said that I was an Idiot Savant when I was a young child. I do remember relatives giving me complex mathematical problems and then applauding the answers I gave them.. and which I'm sure I just pulled out of the air. I'm certain that they were just "pulling my leg". But.. if I did have this talent, it went away a long time ago.

This subject is intensely interesting to me.
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