…People like him are not easily found, and savantism offers a unique window into the mind. If we cannot explain it, we cannot claim full understanding of how the brain functions.
When J. Langdon Down first described savant syndrome in 1887, coining its name and noting its association with astounding powers of memory, he cited a patient who could recite Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire verbatim. Since then, in almost all cases, savant memory has been linked to a specific domain, such as music, art or mathematics. But phenomenal memory is itself the skill in a 54-year-old man named Kim Peek. His friends call him “Kim-puter.”
He can, indeed, pull a fact from his mental library as fast as a search engine can mine the Internet. Peek began memorizing books at the age of 18 months, as they were read to him. He has learned 9,000 books by heart so far. He reads a page in 8–10 seconds and places the memorized book upside down on the shelf to signify that it is now on his mental “hard drive.”
Peek’s memory extends to at least 15 interests—among them, world and American history, sports, movies, geography, space programs, actors and actresses, the Bible, church history, literature, Shakespeare and classical music. He knows all the area codes and zip codes in the US together with the television stations serving those locales. He learns the maps in the front of phone books and can provide MapQuest-like travel directions within any major U.S. city or between any pair of them. He can identify hundreds of classical compositions, tell when and where each was composed and first performed, give the name of the composer and many biographical details, and even discuss the formal and tonal components of the music. Most intriguing of all, he appears to be developing a new skill in middle life. Whereas before he could merely talk about music, for the past two years he has been learning to play it.
It is an amazing feat in light of his severe developmental problems—characteristics shared, in varying extents, by all savants. He walks with a sidelong gait, cannot button his clothes, cannot manage the chores of daily life and has great difficulties with abstraction.
…Peek underwent psychological testing in 1988. His overall IQ score was 87, but the verbal and performance subtests varied greatly, with some scores falling in the superior range of intelligence and others in the mentally retarded range…Peek’s overall diagnosis was developmental disorder not otherwise specified, with no diagnosis of autistic disorder. Indeed, although autism is more commonly linked with savantism than is any other single disorder, only about half of all savants are autistic. In contrast with autistic people, Peek is outgoing and quite personable.
Memory and Music: In Peek’s case, all the interests began in rote memorization but later progressed to something more. Although Peek generally has a limited capacity for abstract or conceptual thinking—he cannot, for example, explain many commonplace proverbs—he does comprehend much of the material he has committed to memory.
This degree of comprehension is unusual among savants. Down himself coined the interesting phrase verbal adhesion to describe the savants ability to remember huge quantities of words without comprehension. Sarah Parker, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, in a description of a savant named Gordon stated it more colorfully when she noted that owning a kiln of bricks does not make one a mason. Peek not only owns a large kiln of bricks, he has also become a strikingly creative and versatile word mason within his chosen areas of expertise.
Sometimes his answers are quite concrete and literal. Once when asked by his father in a restaurant to lower his voice, Peek merely slid lower into his chair, thus lowering his voice box. In other cases, his answers can seem quite ingenious. In one of his talks he answered a question about Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by responding, “Will’s house, 227 North West Front Street. But he stayed there only one night—he gave the speech the next day.” Peek intended no joke, but when his questioner laughed, he saw the point; since then, he has purposely recycled the story with humorous intent and effect.
Peek does have the power to make clever connections. He once attended a Shakespeare festival sponsored by a philanthropist known by the initials O. C. [?] whose laryngitis threatened to keep him from acknowledging a testimonial. Peek—a fan of Shakespeare, and like him, an incorrigible punster—quipped, “O. C. can you say?”
Such creative use of material that had originally been memorized by rote can be seen as the verbal equivalent of a musician’s improvisation. Like the musician, Peek thinks quickly, so quickly that it can be difficult to keep up with his intricate associations. Often he seems two or 3 steps ahead of his audiences in his responses.
…Greenan, a Mozart scholar, makes these observations: Kim’s ability to recall every detail of a composition he has heard—in many cases only once and more than 40 years ago—is astonishing. The connections he draws between and weaves through compositions, composer’s lives, historical events, movie soundtracks and thousands of facts stored in his database reveal enormous intellectual capacity. She even compares him to Mozart, who also had an enlarged head, a fascination with numbers and uneven social skills. She wonders whether Peek might even learn to compose.
[Imagine describing Kim Peek as if he were an LLM: “…We find that GPT-4 is able to memorize long passages from standard books like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, even early in training; however, despite its linguistic fluency, its answers on the PiC (Proverbs in Context) dataset remain only somewhat above chance. Our text-formatted IQ test revealed wide disparity in sub-scales, with scores ranging from gifted to retarded using the standardized human norms; qualitatively, GPT-4 has remarkable ‘verbal adhesion’ in having memorized wide ranges of material, but as the PiC benchmark reveals, its understand lags far behind. Personality profiles indicated that RLHF training was successful in inculcating a friendly outgoing personality, and blinded testers enjoyed friendly chats with it—one characterizing the chatbot as ‘outgoing and quite personable’…“]
…The cerebellar findings may account for Peek’s problems with coordination and mobility. But more striking still is the absence of a corpus callosum, the sizable stalk of nerve tissue that normally connects the left and right halves of the brain…It would seem that those born without a corpus callosum somehow develop back channels of communication between the hemispheres. Perhaps the resulting structures allow the two hemispheres to function, in certain respects, as one giant hemisphere, putting normally separate functions under the same roof, as it were. If so, then Peek may owe some of his talents to this particular abnormality. In any case, the fact that some people lacking a corpus callosum suffer no disabilities, whereas others have savant abilities, makes its purpose less clear than formerly thought. Neurologists joke that its only two certain functions are to propagate seizures and hold the brain together.
Theory guides us in one respect. Peek’s brain shows abnormalities in the left hemisphere, a pattern found in many savants. What is more, left hemisphere damage has been invoked as an explanation of why males are much more likely than females to display not only savantism but also dyslexia, stuttering, delayed speech, and autism. Also supporting the role of left hemisphere damage are the many reported cases of acquired savant syndrome, in which older children and adults suddenly develop savant skills after damage to the left hemisphere.
What does all this evidence imply? One possibility is that when the left hemisphere cannot function properly, the right hemisphere compensates by developing new skills, perhaps by recruiting brain tissue normally earmarked for other purposes.