Kim Peek: The Real Rain Man

Kim Peek: The Real Rain Man is a biographical documentary which takes a look at the megasavant Kim Peek.

To this day, Kim Peek (Nov. 11, 1951 – Dec. 19, 2009) possessed one of the most extraordinary memories every recorded in a human being.

His special abilities started early, around the age of a year and a half. Kim could read both pages of an open book at once, one page with one eye and the other with the other eye.

Even by reading extraordinarily fast like this, Kim’s reading comprehension was exceptional. He would retain 98 percent of the information he read.

Because he could quickly absorb loads of information and recall it when necessary, his savant syndrome made him a living encyclopedia and a walking GPS. Furthermore, his math skills were exceptional; easily doing calendar calculations in his head.

Unlike many individuals with savant syndrome, Kim Peek was not afflicted with autistic spectrum disorder. Though he was strongly introverted, he did not have difficulties with social understanding and communication. The main cause of his remarkable abilities seems to have been the lack of connections between his brain’s two hemispheres.

An MRI scan revealed an absence of the corpus callosum, the anterior commissure and the hippocampal commissure, the parts of the neurological system that transfer information between hemispheres. In a sense, Kim was a natural-born split-brain patient.

Following his life, Kim Peek: The Real Rain Man gives us a great insight into Kim’s life and the family who took care of him.