Kim Peek

A remarkable boy was born.

Kim Peek had a developmental disability characterized by a disruption in the development of white matter that connects each brain hemisphere to one another.

Despite doctors saying he would never walk or talk, by age six, he managed to read and commit to memory the first eight volumes of the family encyclopedias.

He has also memorized multiple phone books and travel maps and can provide GPS-level directions in any major U.S. city.

This seems to be the big looming question: Do we need a bridge or an antenna? Do we all have savant skills sitting latent that can suddenly be unburied, or are they something that can be tapped into by reducing the parts of our brain that filter out information? Is the brain an organ that we just completely don't understand or an antenna that can do so much more?

Kim Peek, one of the most well-known or at least one of the most incredible savants of all time, who was the inspiration for Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man, he had no corpus callosum, and the corpus callosum is the whole thick bundle of axons that connect the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere.

So his right hemisphere and left hemisphere just did not talk to each other, and he was able to read books two pages at a time with his left eye reading the left page, right eye reading the right page, and completely remember all of it.

If the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere are talking a lot to each other, maybe they're doing a lot of inhibiting of one another.

So he's wrong.

If you look at Kim Peek, the first model autistic savant used for the roadmap, he would read books, the left page with the left eye, the right page with the right eye.

He read 10,000 books and he could repeat accurately any sentence he was asked to.

He had 98% accuracy on 10,000 books.