KIM PEEK
Kim Peek had been born with cranial bones that had failed to fuse properly in the womb, so at birth, part of his cortical tissue protruded through a baseball-sized blister at the back of his head. His brain also lacked a corpus callosum, the thick bundle of white matter that usually coordinates communication between the left and right hemispheres. A doctor told his parents that he was hopelessly retarded and belonged in an institution. But his parents refused.
As an infant, Peek began developing extraordinary cognitive capacities. By 18 months, he was memorizing every book his parents read to him, word for word. At three, he was able to look up words in the dictionary and sound them out phonetically. He was equally adept with numbers. He would read telephone books for fun and total up numbers on passing license plates. He was eventually able to read two pages of a book simultaneously – one with his right eye and one with his left – even of they were held upside down or reflected in a mirror.
Permanently excluded from school for being disruptive, he mastered the high school curriculum with the help of tutors by the time he was 14. Taking a job at a sheltered workshop for disabled people, he performed complex payroll calculations without benefit of an adding machine; one of his nicknames was “the Kimputer”. Yet he was unable to dress himself or attend to many of his basic needs without help. When he finally learned to shave, he would close his eyes in front of the mirror because he couldn’t stand seeing the sides of his face reversed.
Peek was a savant: a modern version of the prodigiously gifted “idiots” described by 19th-century clinicians. One was an intellectually disabled boy who had memorized The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire – albeit in rote, mechanical fashion. Another boy was able to instantly multiply two three-digit numbers in his head even before the doctor could jot them down.
But Peek’s special abilities were not restricted to one or two narrow domains. He could also recall classical music scores note for note.
RAIN MAN
Peek’s father invited the director of the Bill films (played by Mickey Rooney), Barry Morrow, to enlist him in raising public awareness of intellectual disability. Peek reeled off the closing credits from Bill verbatim. As they went over mailing lists, Peek began correcting erroneous zip codes on the fly and was able to recite step-by-step driving instructions between any two points in the United States and Canada. He was also an inexhaustible font of sports trivia. To his parents and a small circle of friends, Peek was an eccentric marvel who spent most of his time alone in his room. To Morrow, he seemed like an extraordinary protagonist in search of a plot. He came up with the script for Rain Man, United Pictures was excited to make the movie and Dustin Hoffman loved the script.
Leading critics took issue with the film in ways that said more about the prevailing views of autism than they did about Rain Man. But audiences embraced the film, which went on to gross nearly $355 million worldwide, making it one of the most financially successful Hollywood releases of all time. In addition to winning Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Director and Best Screenplay, Rain Man earned a slew of other honours: two Golden Globes and a People’s Choice Award.
More importantly, the public for the first time started to understand autism. Autistic children became proud to be autistic. The film had made innumerable autistics visible – to their loved ones, neighbours, teachers, doctors, and themselves. The character of Raymond Babbit made autism recognizable and familiar to everyone. Dustin Hoffman said “The film touches something in us that I can’t explain. We all go through life not hugging quite as much as we’d like to. Something cuts us off . . . We’re always keeping a lid on our own autism.” Parents from all over the world wanted to know how to set up NSAC groups. An unprecedented surge of interest in autism spread through mainstream media. Autistics made appearances on Oprah and The Larry King Show, performing feats of lightning calculation for the wide-eyed hosts. One film did more for autism than all of the people in the NSAC working worldwide had been able to do in 25 years. And Rain Man was just the beginning.
