The Real Rain Man. A guest post by Justyna Dorris

Have you ever seen the 1988 movie “Rain Man” with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise? Well did you know that Hoffman’s character Raymond was based off of a real person named Kim Peek? Well it’s true. Kim Peek was born in 1951 and passed away in 2009 and Kim was a remarkable savant. “A savant is an individual who-with little or no apparent effort-completes intellectual tasks that would be impossible for ordinary people to master” (Brogaard & Marlow, 2012). Savants also have serious mental and/or physical disabilities along with their spectacular talents. This is typically referred to as having savant syndrome, which is an exceptionally rare phenomenon. This syndrome is one of the most interesting phenomena to study in the field of cognitive psychology (Hiles, 2002). When it came to Kim Peek, his special talents started early in his life at around the age of 1 ½ years old. “He could read both pages of an open book at once, one page with one eye and the other with the other eye. This style of reading continued until his death in 2009” (Brogaard & Marlow, 2012). Kim was able to retain 98% of the information he read, and that’s how he would spend his days. With him being able to absorb information so fast and also able to recall it at the drop of a hat, he was a walking GPS and a living and breathing encyclopedia. If you were driving from one city to another, he would be able to give you driving directions. If you gave him a date, like June 15, 1632 he could tell you what day it was and he was also able to remember an immense amount of political, musical, and historical facts. His memory was astounding (Brogaard & Marlow, 2012).

Many other individuals with savant syndrome are afflicted with autistic spectrum disorder, but Kim Peek was not one of these people. Though Kim didn’t suffer from autistic spectrum disorder he was highly dependent on his father, who took care him his whole life. Kim’s dad would dress him every morning and bring him to the library every day. Kim could never have a driver’s licenses or a girlfriend, because that would be too much for him to handle. When Kim was born he was diagnosed with mental retardation and the doctors told his parents that he’d never be able to talk or read. They suggested sending him to an institution and getting on with their lives. In spite of these recommendations, his parents decided to raise him rather than send him away and forget about him. “They quickly realized that their little boy with the oversized head had a remarkable brain. Due to his parents' efforts, Kim had the opportunity to develop his amazing talents. A large head does not equal intelligence or ability to retain information. But it does provide more storage space for someone who is able to process the content of 10,000 books, which was the number of books Peek had read by the time of his death” (Brogaard & Marlow, 2012). If his parents had sent him away like the doctors had suggested, Kim’s special talents would have never fully developed the way they had. Without Kim there would not have been the movie Rain Man and people would not really be aware of savant syndrome, even though it was done in a comical way. Savants are rare, but they are out there and they have something to offer to the world of cognitive psychology and the way the human brain works. “It is often claimed that, because of the extraordinary abilities involved, we will never truly understand human memory and cognition until we understand the savant” (Hiles, 2002).

Short Clip about Kim Peek:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZBucCevSeE