“Man Who Inspired Rain Man Dies At 58”, 2009-12-22 ():
…Kim Peek couldn’t operate a light switch or button his shirt. But his memory was so vast and deep and exact, he was compared to a computer. In fact, some called him “Kim-puter.”
“He had a bottomless memory”, recalls Daniel Christensen, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Utah’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. During the past 20 years, Christensen examined, tested and traveled with Peek.
Peek had the ability to recall facts and patterns about history, mathematics, music and geography but, adds Christensen, “the ability to take those things … and use them, to reason with them, make sense of them, to know the implications, to make judgments based on them, that’s a very different thing. And that’s sort of where his mental abilities ended.”
Christensen discovered a rare birth defect, known as agenesis of the corpus callosum, during a brain scan in the 1980s. Peek was missing the thick bundle of millions of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. But a precise explanation for Peek’s mix of abilities and disabilities remained elusive.
“No one knows to this day why, exactly why, people can do things like Kim could do”, Christensen says.
…Peek’s memory improved over time, prompting NASA to make him the subject of MRI research. And his memory was sharp to the end. It was his heart that gave out Saturday. “I think it’ll be a long time before we have another Kim”, Christensen says. “I don’t think there has been anyone like Kim in recorded history.”
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