Inside the Mind of a Savant

Kim Peek, the autistic savant who inspired the Oscar-winning film Rain Man, has died, aged 58.

Mr Peek's father Fran said that his son had suffered a major heart attack on Saturday and was pronounced dead at a hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, the town where he had spent his life.

Mr Peek was probably the world's most famous savant. Described as a confounding mixture of disability and genius, his astonishing ability to retain knowledge inspired the writer Barry Morrow to write Rain Man, the 1988 movie starring Dustin Hoffman that won four Academy Awards.

Born in 1951 in Salt Lake city, Mr Peek was diagnosed as severely mentally retarded and his parents were advised to place him in an institution and forget about him. Thirty years later, he was classified as a "mega-savant," a genius in about 15 different subjects, from history and literature and geography to numbers, sports, music and dates.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6964730.ece

my brother was distantly similar to Mr. Peek. he did not have his truly savant capabilities, but their lives were not far different.

he Mr. Peek died December 19, 2009. not that it means anything by way of connection, but my brother also died last year. bizarre eh....
 
There was a special about him, including footage and interviews with him and his father, about a year or so ago on either the History Channel or Discovery. Although the article cited above suggests that he was autistic, apparently he had suffered massive brain damage as a result of an early childhood accident. Those parts of the brain that can take over some functions after injury did so, but the normal balance and "filtering" processes were not intact and were not spared by that process.

This must have been devastating for his father. He was with his son constantly. On the other hand, that gentleman was quite elderly and had been making provisions for his son's care after he, himself, died. His health may have been poor; there was some specific reason, not just old age, that precipitated his making these arrangements and preparing to have them carried out with as little trauma for his son as humanly possible.
 
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