Tag: Savant

Content below is from #176 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

• This week I recommend you check out the YouTube Channel Real Stories
  • Their description: Welcome to Real Stories, the home of award-winning and compelling documentaries you need to see. We will be uploading at least three full-length documentaries a week from the best documentary producers on the planet. Subscribe so you don’t miss out.

• Shannon and I often sit down and watch these documentaries for free on YouTube. I’d say the average length is about 1 hour and they are a delight to watch.
  • Plus they are documentaries so you are learning about the real world when you watch them.
  • A video with the YouTube title ” The Genius Within: Extraordinary Gifted People | Real Stories Full-Length Documentary ” was the inspiration for this episode.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

• The movie Rain Man starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise released on December 12th, 1988.
  • Here’s the plot:
    • When car dealer Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) learns that his estranged father has died, he returns home to Cincinnati, where he discovers that he has an autistic older brother named Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) and that his father’s $3 million fortune is being left to the mental institution in which Raymond lives. Motivated by his father’s money, Charlie checks Raymond out of the facility in order to return with him to Los Angeles. The brothers’ cross-country trip ends up changing both their lives.
• Dustin Hoffman took home an Oscar award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his portrayal of the autistic savant Raymond in the film Rain Man.
  • Dustin Hoffman’s character is based on a real person named Laurence Kim Peek.
    • Although Peek was previously diagnosed with autism, he is now thought to have had FG syndrome
    • The National Organization of Rare Disorders explains:
      • FG syndrome type 1 (FGS1) is an X-linked genetic disorder that is characterized by poor muscle tone (hypotonia), intellectual disability, constipation and or anal anomalies and complete or partial absence of the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres of the brain (corpus callosum).
  • In his Oscar acceptance speech, Hoffman thanked Kim Peek and cited him as the inspiration for the character.
  • While being mentioned during a big Oscar acceptance speech is pretty darn cool, it is far from the coolest thing about Kim Peek.

• Born in Salt Lake City Utah on November 11th, 1951 with an abnormally enlarged head, Kim’s doctors accurately predicted developmental issues in his future.
• • He was born with with macrocephaly, damage to the cerebellum, and agenesis of the corpus callosum,a condition in which the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain is missing; in Peek’s case, secondary connectors
    • such as the anterior commissure were also missing.^[5] There is speculation that his neurons made unusual connections due to the absence of a corpus callosum, resulting in an increased memory capacity.
  • Unable to walk until the age of 4, unable to walk with a normal gait, unable to button his shirts, and kicked out of school after just one day… his community was ready to give up on Kim. The medical world said he would never walk, talk or be able to learn.
    • Although Peek was previously diagnosed with autism, he is now thought to have had FG syndrome
    • The National Organization of Rare Disorders explains:
      • FG syndrome type 1 (FGS1) is an X-linked genetic disorder that is characterized by poor muscle tone (hypotonia), intellectual disability, constipation and or anal anomalies and complete or partial absence of the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres of the brain (corpus callosum).
  • Not long after being expelled from school, his family and community started to notice his abilities. Even as a small child, Kim was able to memorize virtually everything. As a toddler, he was reciting books word for word.
    • In addition to being diagnosed with developmental disabilities, Kim was diagnosed with Savant Syndrome.
    • Dr. Darold Treffert (Psychiatrist from the University of Wisconsin) explains:
      • “Savant Syndrome is a rare but spectacular condition in which somebody with a developmental disability such as autism has some spectacular island of genius that stands in stark contrast to overall handicap.”
    • Proving his doctors wrong, he is now believed to have had the greatest factual memory in the world. He memorized 98% of everything he read.

•  According to Peek’s father, Fran (Francis) Peek, Kim was able to memorize things from the age of 16–20 months. Peek read books, memorized them, and then placed them upside down on the shelf to show that he had finished reading them, a practice he maintained all his life. He could speed through a book in about an hour and remember almost everything he had read, memorizing vast amounts of information in subjects ranging from history and literature, geography and numbers to sports, music and dates. Peek read by scanning the left page with his left eye, while reading the right page with his right eye. According to an article in The Times newspaper, he could accurately recall the contents of at least 12,000 books. Peek lived in Murray, Utah, and spent a considerable amount of his time reading at the Salt Lake City Library and demonstrating his capabilities at schools, with great help from his father
  • Peek did not walk until he was four years old, and even then in a sidelong manner. He could not button up his shirt and had difficulty with other ordinary motor skills, presumably due to his damaged cerebellum, which normally coordinates motor activities. In psychological testing, Peek yielded superior ability in the performance sub-tests and limited ability in the verbal sub-tests, leading his overall IQ of 87 not to be considered a valid measure of his cognitive ability.
  • In his adult life, Peek attended the Columbus Center and earned $40 a week doing payrolls for 86 employees at the Salt Lake City School District.His father didn’t fully appreciate Peek’s talents until 1979 when he correctly predicted that the plummeting Skylab would land near Perth, Australia

Rain Man

In 1984, screenwriter Barry Morrow met Peek in Arlington, Texas; the result of the meeting was the 1988 Academy Award-winning film Rain Man. The character of Raymond Babbitt, although inspired by Peek, was depicted as being an individual with autism. Dustin Hoffman, who portrayed Babbitt in the film, met Peek and other individuals who displayed savant mannerisms, studying their characteristics and nature in order to play the role as accurately as possible. The movie led to a number of requests for appearances, which increased Peek’s self-confidence. Barry Morrow gave Peek his Oscar statuette to carry with him and show at these appearances; it has since been referred to as the “Most Loved Oscar Statue” because it has been held by more people than any other. Peek also enjoyed approaching strangers and showing them his talent for calendar calculations by telling them on which day of the week they were born and what news items were on the front page of major newspapers that day. Peek also appeared on television. He traveled with his father, who took care of him and performed many motor tasks that Peek found difficult.

Scientific investigation

In 2004, scientists at the Center for Bioinformatics Space Life Sciences at the NASA Ames Research Center examined Peek with a series of tests including computed tomography (CT scan) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The intent was to create a three-dimensional view of his brain structure and to compare the images to MRI scans performed in 1988. These were the first tentative approaches in using non-invasive technology to further investigate Kim’s savant abilities.

By the time he was 18, despite his lack of schooling, Peek had a job doing payroll for a company with 160 employees. It took him only a few hours a week, and he performed all the necessary calculations in his head.

Despite his prodigious feats, Peek’s IQ was only 87, and he lived a quiet life in the care of his family… until Rain Man. Afterward, he often toured the country with his father, advocating tolerance for disabled individuals and demonstrating some of the amazing things that he could do… things that the rest of us couldn’t even imagine being able to do.

1. Reading Both Pages of an Open Book at Once One reason Kim was able to provide so much detail and depth from his voluminous memory was that he could speed-read anything put in front of him. Peek could open a book and read each of the two facing pages at the same time – the left eye reading the left page, the right eye reading the right one, effectively absorbing both pages at once. Even thick books were filtered into his brain in under an hour using this technique. He became known for going through the better part of the entire catalog of books in the Salt Lake City Library reading everything he could get his hands on.
2. Providing Instant Driving Directions Between Any Two Cities In The World Before Google Maps could do it, Kim could. Among his other reading materials at the library, he absorbed maps, atlases, and travel guides. Using a combination of his near-perfect recall and his prodigious mathematical calculating abilities, Kim could calculate the best routes in his head in an instant, years before anybody thought to put a computer on the job.

3. Figuring Out What Day Anyone’s Birthday Was Not just the date… the day. And not just for modern people… Kim could tell you in a second that Isaac Newton was born on a Sunday—but also, interestingly, that his birthday was both Christmas Day 1642, and January 4, 1643, since two competing calendars were in use at the time. Even better, Peek could instantly provide any other notable events that might have happened on the same day from his recall of newspaper headlines and other historical readings.
4. Reciting Any Shakespeare Play VerbatimKim loved Shakespeare and with his high-speed reading skills didn’t have any trouble absorbing the entirety of the Bard’s body of work. He also enjoyed going to performances of Shakespeare’s plays, but there was a problem… not all of the actors could remember their lines as perfectly as Kim did. When a thespian deviated, even slightly, from the original work, Kim would stand up mid-performance to correct them. An impressive feat of memory, but not something that went over well with the Shakespeare in the Park crowd.
5. Counting CardsThe scene from Rain Man where Raymond hits it big at the Vegas blackjack tables never happened in real life, but Kim did read a book on card counting and had all the mental faculties to perform that feat… but even savants know right from wrong.When the screenwriter for the movie tried to get Peek to enter a casino to try the experiment in real life, Kim refused, feeling that it would be unethical.Kim Peek passed away in 2009 of a heart attack, but his feats will not soon be forgotten, thanks to Rain Man. Nor did Peek ever forget his own role as inspiration for the movie—to his dying day, one of his most prized possessions, that he carried with him everywhere he traveled, was the golden Oscar statute given to him by the screenwriter who won it for penning the movie.

• Peek died of a heart attack at his home on December 19, 2009, aged 58.
  • Barry Morrow put his own Oscar statuette on permanent loan to Salt Lake City in memory of Kim Peek and put forward the money for the Peek Award, which “pays tribute to artists, media makers, and film subjects who are positively impacting our society’s perception of people with disabilities” and is given out by the Utah Film Center
• Most people who met Kim when he was alive thought his memory would have reached capacity at some point, but up until the day he died, he was still absorbing, retaining, and recalling information at lightning speed.
• His brain was wired completely differently from the rest of humanity.
  • That Corpus callosum I mentioned earlier, the thing Kim was born without, is white matter that carries vital connections between the left and right sides of the brain.
  • No one really knows how, but Kim’s brain was able to rewire itself in an entirely unique way.
  • The human body is amazing… especially the brain.
  • And whenever someone asked him how he did it, whenever most savants are asked how they do it… they have no answer. They can’t explain their methods. Kim would say something like “I look into my own mind,” when offering an explanation for his otherworldly gift.

CREDIT:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek
• https://www.appliedbehavioranalysisedu.org/5-mind-blowing-things-kim-peek-could-do-that-you-cant/