Kim Peek: The Real Rainman....

[Guest guest]

This article is in todays Times. Wonder if a study of Enlightenment

with Kim could be in the offing?

 

Interview

 

 

Meet the real Rain Man

Joanna Walters

 

He inspired a movie and now he is reaching for the sky with Nasa

 

 

KIM PEEK bowls into the B & B and, with a slightly sidelong gait, heads

straight for the small kitchen, where he tilts his brow quizzically

and regards the chef with a beady eye.

Peek's father, Fran, who has rushed through the hall to catch up with

his son, says to the chef: " Give him your birth date. "

 

 

 

" December 12, 1972, " says a bemused John Davis, as Kim crinkles up

his eyes behind thick glasses and cracks a gleeful grin. " You were

born on a Tuesday, this year it's a Monday, you will retire in 2037

on a Saturday, " Kim says. He then rattles off the teams, scores and

home-run details of the 1972 baseball World Series and, when Davis

names his hometown in Oregon, Kim lists all the postcodes, utility-

company addresses, roads and TV stations that he has memorised from

local directories and atlases. He can repeat this exercise for

anywhere in the United States.

 

Kim's face is not familiar, but the rapid monotone that delivers this

helter-skelter information is instantly recognisable as the style of

his famous fictional alter ego, Rain Man. Kim Peek is the real-life

autistic savant who inspired Dustin Hoffman's eponymous character in

one of Hollywood's most memorable films. Peek, 53, is more sociable,

more complex and many times more prodigious than the movie character:

in subjects from music to history to total recall of the works of

Shakespeare. But he needs help cleaning his teeth and getting washed

and shaved.

 

Now Kim's astonishing brain has sparked a Nasa experiment that could

unlock secrets stretching from deepest space travel to the furthest

interiors of the human mind.

 

" It's going to be really great for me, " intones Kim, as he sits down

on a sofa and grasps a glass of water with both hands. At the

slightest prompt he launches into a rapid-fire family history of his

forebears' arrival in New England from Norfolk, their subsequent

migration to Utah and their involvement with polygamy when it was at

its height in the Mormon community in the 1920s.

 

To break the bombardment of the monologue his son has embarked on,

Fran suddenly reaches into a cloth bag, heaves out a familiar-looking

gold statuette and puts it on the coffee table. " The Oscar! The

Oscaaarrrrrr! " Kim shrieks. He puts his head back and half-giggles,

half-roars, then drums his fists on his thighs in childlike

excitement.

 

In addition to Best Movie and Best Actor Oscars, the screenwriter

Barry Morrow also won an Oscar for creating the movie. Says

Morrow: " He came to visit me after the Academy Awards and was

mesmerised by the Oscar. " Morrow has allowed the Peeks to look after

the statuette and they take it on speaking tours.

 

Rain Man's story of actor Tom Cruise's selfish yuppie Charlie Babbitt

discovering that a brother he never knew existed has been left their

father's fortune, then kidnapping him from an institution and driving

him to California in a Buick, bears no resemblance to the Peeks' life

story.

 

Kim has the staggering arithmetic skills of the Raymond Babbitt

character, and can count playing cards. But Kim displays these

talents only if he wants to. Morrow recalls, chuckling: " I took him

to Reno to see if he could beat the casino. He read and memorised an

entire book about gambling, but would not play the tables because he

said it was unethical. "

 

The film in 1988 was a turning point in Kim's life. He had been a

virtual recluse all his life, venturing into the wider world only

occasionally, such as to the conference of the Association of

Retarded Citizens, where he met Morrow. Hoffman spent a day with Kim

and was so awed by his abilities that he urged a reluctant Fran to

share his son with the world.

 

Fran was afraid that Kim would get frightened and upset. Or that he

would be regarded as a freak show. But Kim has blossomed into a much

more sociable person, and the Peeks have crisscrossed the US and

talked to more than two million people.

 

Kim has read more than 9,000 books and memorised them with his

photographic mind.

 

Unlike any other savant known to the world scientific community, Kim

can read a page with each eye simultaneously, even if the book is

upside down or sideways.

 

Kim's mother, Jeanne, divorced Fran after 32 years in 1981, but she

still lives in Salt Lake City and the family is in close contact. Kim

also has a brother, Brian, and a sister, Alison, who will have legal

powers of guardianship for Kim, assuming that Fran, who is 79 and has

diabetes, dies ahead of the son he has dedicated his life to bringing

up.

 

The latest breakthrough in Kim's life came last October. He spoke at

a Rotary Club lunch in Monterey, California, where a prominent

member, Sam Downing, is also chief executive of the Salinas Valley

Hospital, which specialises in scanning. The hospital works with a

nearby arm of Nasa that investigates the effects of zero-gravity

space travel on astronauts.

Downing persuaded Kim to be scanned and has teamed up with Nasa to

make what they hope will be a detailed brain map that could help to

unlock motion sickness, vertigo, memory and brain-cell renewal.

Salinas Valley doctors gave Kim MRI and CT scans and the Nasa team is

about to take the raw data and fuse them into a high-resolution,

three-dimensional computer model. Nasa experts hope to track the

electrical impulses of Kim's brain, giving them in sight into how the

synapses adjust to forces such as acceleration and gravity.

 

 

 

Nasa wants new ways to keep astronauts healthy. It also aims to

create compact scanner machines that can be carried by the Space

Shuttle to diagnose illness in sick astronauts thousands of miles

from Earth.

 

Kim was born with an unusually large head and a water blister inside

his skull that damaged the left hemisphere, which controls language

and motor skills. And in 1988, when he was given his first scan, his

neuroscientist was shocked to discover that Kim has no corpus

callosum, the membrane that separates the two hemispheres of the

brain. Scientists want to find out whether Kim's brain is fused into

one huge databank or whether he has the equivalent of two brains

separately processing phenomenal quantities of information — but with

little reasoning.

 

When Kim was born in 1951, doctors told his parents that he would

never walk or learn and that they should put him in an

institution . " We just decided to love him instead, " says Fran. Kim

could not walk until he was 4, but could read at 16 months. He was

more or less ignored by the education authorities, but after Fran

fought for home tutoring, Kim completed the secondary school (or high

school) curriculum by the time he was 14. The authorities did not

deign to give him his high-school certificate until after Rain Man

made him famous.

 

Fran notes bitterly that it is a good thing he and his dad did not

respond to the invitation extended by the renowned brain surgeon

Peter Lindstrom after he visited Salt Lake City when Kim was 6 and

offered him (and other disabled children) a lobotomy to make him

easier to institutionalise. " Bastard! " explodes Kim at the mention of

Lindstrom. He has never fallen in love romantically, but is very

loving towards family and friends.

 

Munching dinner at the Little America restaurant in Salt Lake City,

he suddenly breaks off and starts singing loudly to the background

music. " It's from Rain Man. The scene where he teaches him to dance, "

says Kim, chortling at the coincidence.

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just so...laughing,living,no goals,no thinking,Loving is Kim..bob