17.6.2020 Savant in the Limelight, 1988-2009 | The Scientist Magazine® Home / Archive / May 2020 / Foundations Savant in the Limelight, 1988–2009 Kim Peek, the inspiration for the title character in Rain Man, brought public attention to savan syndrome. Sukanya Charuchandra May 1, 2020 ven for Darold Tre–ert, an expert in the study of savants who has E met around 300 people with conditions such as autism who ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, PEEPO possess extraordinary mental abilities, Kim Peek stood out from the pack. Tre–ert —rst spoke with Peek on the phone in the 1980s. Peek asked Tre–ert for his date of birth and then proceeded to recount historical events that had taken place on tha day and during that week, Tre–ert says. This display of recall leÝ Tre–ert 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 Association for Retarded Citizens. Morrow went on to pen the script for the 1988 —lm Rain Man, basing Dustin Ho–man’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.) https://www.the-scientist.com/foundations/savant-in-the-limelight-19882009-67446 1/2 17.6.2020 Savant in the Limelight, 1988-2009 | The Scientist Magazine® MEMORY 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. © RICHARD GREEN PHOTOGRAPHY 2006, COURTESY OF SALINAS VALLEY MEMORIAL HEALTHCARE SYSTEM Nine months aÝer 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 Tre–ert. “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 boo memorizing them. Despite his feats of memory and other abilities, such as performing impressive calculation his head, Peek never learned to carry out many everyday tasks, such as dressing himself. MRIs would later rev that Peek had abnormalities in the leÝ 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 syndrom which a–ects both the brain and body. Pamela Heaton, a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, notes that exceptional abilities like Peek’s are seen more oÝen in people with autism than in those wi other conditions. An a”nity for structure, an ability to recognize patterns in data, and elevated perception see to play a role in the abilities of autistic savants, according to Laurent Mottron, a professor of psychiatry at the University 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. Tre–ert, who proposed that savants fall into three categories 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 ha progressed considerably since Peek was born. “There was a very di–erent view then than now,” due in large pa to Rain Man, says Tre–ert. Mottron, though, suspects the neurodiversity movement—which advocates for resp equality, civil rights, and inclusion for neurodivergent individuals—has done more to change public perceptio of such conditions. While Tre–ert’s categories are just one of the many ways researchers seek to understand savant syndrome, no framework 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 hum memory more generally Originally from Mumbai, Sukanya Charuchandra is a freelance science writer based out of wherever her travels take her. Email her at [email protected] and read her work at sukanyacharuchandra.com. Keywords: autism, autism spectrum disorder, disability, Ûlm, Foundations, history, history of science, movie, neurobiology, neuroscience https://www.the-scientist.com/foundations/savant-in-the-limelight-19882009-67446 2/2.