Rain Man shatters the myths of the film
He’s not autistic, seldom shops at Kmart and his world might not stop for the “People’s Court.”
But all it takes is a few minutes with Kim Peek, the man who is often described as “a walking Google,” to see how he became the inspiration behind the 1988 Oscar-winning film, “Rain Man.”
Peek has memorized the old and new testaments of The Bible, knows the Koran verbatim and can recite the complete works of William Shakespeare backwards and forwards.
If that’s not impressive enough, his memory also includes a seemingly endless file of historical facts, sports trivia, famous quotations and important dates.
Tell him your birthday and he can immediately tell you what day of the week it was when you were born.
Wait a second and he’ll also inform you what day your birthday falls on this year and what year and day it will be when you turn 65.
Then ask him if any important events happened on the day you were born. If it was April 18, 1952, for example, he’ll be the first to tell you that was the day the Yankees beat the Dodgers in a series of four games to three.
All that and conventional tests show his IQ is just 72.
Kim’s father, Fran, who headlined a luncheon at Brunswick’s Diamond Event Center last week to benefit Project: LEARN of Medina County last week with his son, says from the time Kim was 16 months old, he has been reading books — upside down and backwards — sounding out consonants and reading words phonetically.
“When he was 3 years old, he surprised my wife and I one morning when he asked us what ‘confidential’ meant,” Fran said. “We knew that was a word he’d never learned and asked him where he heard it. That’s when he told us he read it that morning in the newspaper. And there it was, right on the front page of the paper.”
Fran said he pointed his son to the dictionary, taught him how to use it and Kim has been reading ever since.
When he was younger, Fran says Kim used to read one page in a book with his left eye and the other with his right. As he’s aged, he can no longer use both eyes simultaneously, but still manages to retain more than 98 percent of what he’s read.
In addition to reading thousands of books in their home library, Kim is also certified by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as having memorized more than 12,000 books — many of which he’s read spending hours at a time in the library.
“I know that after being there for about four hours, the librarians have quite a job on their hands,” Fran says, explaining that after Peek reads a book, he turns it upside down and backwards and puts it back on the shelf so that he knows what he’s already read.
Fascinated by his abilities, NASA has been studying Kim for several years, Fran says, noting that it was physicians with the agency who first informed him that Kim had suffered a stroke on the right side of his cerebellum when he was just 3 or 4 years old.
The stroke, Fran said, left Kim without the ability to reason, which rendered him mentally retarded by conventional standards in the early 1960s.
“We always knew there was something different about him, but the doctors were never quite sure,” Fran said. “He was born with a big head and the doctors just told us he would never walk or talk or learn.”
Fran said physicians instructed the Peeks to put their son, who was the oldest of three children, in an institution and “basically forget about him.”
Fran said they never even thought twice about heeding the doctors’ warnings.
“We just took him home and made him as human as we possibly could,” he said.
When Kim was 6, Fran says doctors wanted to give him a lobotomy, which was common practice at the time. Again, the Peeks refused.
“And thank God we did,” Fran said. “Because then all of us would have missed out on what this wonderful man has to offer the world.”
Technically, Kim never graduated from high school, but has been given several honorary degrees from Ivy League universities including Duke and Oxford. As for his potential, he’s never held a formal job, but he received a paycheck for 12 years for payroll piecework he used to do for a factory in Utah.
“In the 12 years he was responsible for that company’s payroll he never made even one mistake,” Fran says. “And when the law said they had to let him go, it took two accountants being paid $500 to do the work he did for just $700 a month.”
Because a traditional IQ test is not capable of accurately measuring how intelligent Kim is, NASA has asked him to participate in a KQ test which measures his abilities based on his knowledge.
Only five people have taken that test since it was created, Fran said. The names of two of those participants have yet to be released. But the two other include Albert Einstein, who earned a score of 149, and Joseph Stalin, who earned a 137.
Kim Peek’s score was a 184.
For that reason, Fran says NASA refers to his son as the “most prodigious mega-memory savant of all time.”
Because his abilities are so rare and because he’s overcome nearly every obstacle in his path throughout his lifetime, Fran says he’s proud to show off his son’s talents.
“You don’t have to be handicapped to be different,” Kim says. “Everybody is different.”
Source – http://blog.cleveland.com/brunswicksuntimes/2009/07/rain_man_shatters_the_myths_of.html
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