Raymond Babbitt

And with that out of the way, let's get into it.

Peek was the inspiration for Raymond Babbitt in the multiple Academy Award-winning movie Rain Man.

Babbitt, played by Dustin Hoffman, is what is referred to as an autistic savant, a person with almost superhuman mental capabilities in addition to the symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD.

Rain Man is not about Peek, since Peek is not on the autism spectrum.

Oh, my God.

What condition is Dustin Hoffman's character Raymond Babbitt affected by in the 1988 film Rain Man? I would assume autism.

Yes.

Oh, my God.

For example, in Emma, Mr. Knightley repeatedly confronts Emma with the uncomfortable truths about her own pride, privilege, and interference in other people's lives.

It's also important to note that the impact character can be present for most of the story, as in Rain Man, where we see Raymond Babbitt's presence steadily forcing Charlie to reconsider his self-centered assumptions about family, responsibility, and connection.

Or they can be present only intermittently, but still loom large in the protagonist's mind, as in Star Wars, where we see Obi-Wan Kenobi introducing Luke Skywalker to a larger understanding of himself and the Force, and then continuing to influence his choices even after his death.

And the impact character could even be a collective of several characters, as in Cars, where we see the townsfolk of Radiator Springs collectively challenging Lightning McQueen's belief that winning and individual achievement are all that matter.

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.