60 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
FOUNDATIONS© RICHARD GREEN PHOTOGRAPHY 2006, COURTESY OF SALINAS VALLEY MEMORIAL HEALTHCARE SYSTEMBY SUKANYA CHARUCHANDRASavant in the Limelight, 1988–2009
E
ven for Darold Treffert, an expert
in the study of savants who has met
around 300 people with conditions
such as autism who possess extraordinary
mental abilities, Kim Peek stood out from
the pack. Treffert first spoke with Peek on
the phone in the 1980s. Peek asked Treffert
for his date of birth and then proceeded to
recount historical events that had taken place
on that day and during that week, Treffert
says. This display of recall left Treffert with
no doubt that Peek was a savant.
Peek’s abilities dazzled screenwriter
Barry Morrow when the two men met in
1984 at a committee meeting of the Asso-
ciation for Retarded Citizens. Morrow
went on to pen the script for the 1988
film Rain Man, basing Dustin Hoffman’s
character on Peek.
The concept of savant syndrome dates
back to 1887, when physician J. Langdon
Down coined the term “idiot savant” for
persons who showed low IQ but superlative
artistic, musical, mathematical, or other
skills. (At the time, the word “idiot” denoted
low IQ and was not considered insulting.)
Nine months after Peek was born in
1951, a doctor told his family “that Kim
was retarded, and they should put him
in an institution and forget about him,”
says Treffert. “Another doctor suggested
a lobotomy, which fortunately they
didn’t carry out.” Instead, his parents
raised him at home in Utah where he
raced through books, memorizing them.
Despite his feats of memory and other
abilities, such as performing impressive
calculations in his head, Peek never
learned to carry out many everyday tasks,
such as dressing himself. MRIs would
later reveal that Peek had abnormalities
in the left hemisphere of his brain and
was missing a corpus callosum, which
controls communication between the two
cerebral hemispheres.
Peek was diagnosed at one point with
autism and later thought to have a genetic
condition called FG syndrome, which affectsboth the brain and body. Pamela Heaton, a
professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, Uni-
versity of London, notes that exceptional
abilities like Peek’s are seen more often in
people with autism than in those with other
conditions. An affinity for structure, an abil-
ity to recognize patterns in data, and elevated
perception seem to play a role in the abili-
ties of autistic savants, according to Laurent
Mottron, a professor of psychiatry at the Uni-
versity of Montreal.
Up until his death in 2009, Peek
served as an advocate for people with
disabilities, showcasing his incredible
memorization skills to people he met
at speaking engagements. Treffert, who
proposed that savants fall into three cat-
egories based on the types of skills they
possess, believes that Peek was a rare
“prodigious savant,” meaning that his
abilities stood out even compared to neuro-
typical individuals.Research on, and interventions for,
people with savant syndrome, autism,
and other intellectual conditions have
progressed considerably since Peek
was born. “There was a very different
view then than now,” due in large part
to Rain Man, says Treffert. Mottron,
though, suspects the neurodiversity
movement—which advocates for respect,
equality, civil rights, and inclusion for
neurodivergent individuals—has done
more to change public perception of
such conditions.
While Treffert’s categories are just
one of the many ways researchers seek to
understand savant syndrome, no frame-
work has yet emerged that can account for
all cases of the condition. He suggests that
more research on these individuals could
help disentangle the mechanisms not just
of autism and savant syndrome, but of
human memory more generally. gMEMORY MASTER:Kim Peek in 2006. Among Peek’s many remarkable feats was memorizing the index
of a set of encyclopedias, as well as a number of passages from other books, at age six. Over the years,
he would come to recall from memory zip codes for certain areas, call letters for all the regional television
stations, and telephone area codes as well as facts drawn from world history, geography, literature,
popular culture, and more.SYSTEMplacein
Asso-Hoffman’sdates
Langdon MEMORY MASTER:Kim Peek in 2006. Among Peek’s many remarkable feats was memorizing the index