kim peek

i love reading about him.
he was the basis for the character of raymond babbot in rain man

en.wikipedia.org...

he was not autistic. he had FG syndrome.
i know he was ill but his memory was sick.

think eidetic memory with a super charger.

Peek was born in Salt Lake City, Utah[6] with macrocephaly,[5] damage to the cerebellum, and agenesis of the corpus callosum,[7] a condition in which the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain is missing; in Peek's case, secondary connectors such as the anterior commissure were also missing.[5] There is speculation that his neurons made unusual connections due to the absence of a corpus callosum, which resulted in an increased memory capacity.[8][9] According to Peek's father, Fran (Francis) Peek, Kim was able to memorize things from the age of 16–20 months. He read books, memorized them, and then placed them upside down on the shelf to show that he had finished reading them, a practice he maintained all his life. He could speed through a book in about an hour and remember almost everything he had read, memorizing vast amounts of information in subjects ranging from history and literature, geography and numbers to sports, music and dates. Peek read by scanning the left page with his left eye, then the right page with his right eye. According to an article in The Times newspaper, he could accurately recall the contents of at least 12,000 books.

i think it is wild and kind of a cruel joke on us that it is a 'defect' or an 'illness' that causes a sweet memory like that.

on an evolutionary scale wouldnt it benefit individuals and humanity in general if we could all recall things like kim peek?

how does forgetting things or not remembering things, however you want to word it benefit us as a species?

it is also wild that as much as his brain could retain, he could not button his shirts and he had trouble with regular motor skills.

there are videos floating around of him answering random questions..

he would know that march 10th 1975 was a tuesday

check this out



kim peek was the man

a reply to: Mugly

i think it is wild and kind of a cruel joke on us that it is a 'defect' or an 'illness' that causes a sweet memory like that.

I think humans retain lifes experience in memory, verbatim. Just that we don't have the kind of access he did due to a 'defect' (his filters were off). If we had that capacity it would cause problems too, mostly with spatial awareness and when to shut up or overlook little affronts to our person.

We will all carry our experience here, forever.

(imo)

originally posted by: Mugly
he would know that march 10th 1975 was a tuesday

That's because, "pancakes on Tuesday".

That's all I got.

*moonwalks back out of thread*

originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: Mugly

i think it is wild and kind of a cruel joke on us that it is a 'defect' or an 'illness' that causes a sweet memory like that.

I think humans retain lifes experience in memory, verbatim. Just that we don't have the kind of access he did due to a 'defect' (his filters were off). If we had that capacity it would cause problems too, mostly with spatial awareness and when to shut up or overlook little affronts to our person.

We will all carry our experience here, forever.

(imo)

well what is the point in retaining it if we cant access it?

i suppose it is possible it would cause problems but i dont see it.

i think our species in general would benefit from this type of memory

how much more advanced would we be?
maybe we wouldnt at all....

just something i have been thinking about lately

a reply to: Mugly
I believe we all retain everything,and could maybe one day work out how to remember all we have seen/heard/felt.
Think of the people who go into a coma and wake up speaking fluenty in a foriegn language.
Its all locked up in their heads somehow.

I bet I know how to speak french from watching so much of the french cop show "Spiral."

Be so handy to be able to acess all that hidden data we carry.

a reply to: Silcone Synapse

i agree. it would be handy

if we cant access the information we retain then that information is useless.

a reply to: Mugly

well what is the point in retaining it if we can't access it?

We can, just not always on demand. Sometimes you think of someplace you been before and wham, the memory floods our mind that we previously had forgotten? Like that.

In other words its there, but our conscious thought processes don't recall all of it like he is able to. I have excellent recall, but not like him. Others are as able to recall memory like him and aren't dysfunctional, too.

Its not a defect for them, its an asset. My point was everyone is like a security cam on a wall. What we see hear and do is recorded, even in our sleep. For later review, who knows. One day everyone will know who the killers are, their acts being recorded in the camera of their victims mind .

a reply to: intrptr

no we cant.
im talking access like kim peek

we cant do that

having a memory flood back from some cue is not the same thing at all.

im talking about being able to recall facts and answer questions like he did in the video

not even close to the same

a reply to: Mugly

no we can't… we can't do that

Speak for yourself.

having a memory flood back from some cue is not the same thing at all.

Yes it is. Like you linked.

According to an article in The Times newspaper, he could accurately recall the contents of at least 12,000 books.

When prompted or tested he recounts everything. Everything that has happened to him, too.. He can remember every day, the weather, what he did, etc. Just give him a day on the calendar (prompt him), and he says it was snowing at 10 am and I went to the store at eleven. Thats security cam.

Don't believe it, but your brain does it, too. Thats why the memory capacity is so great in our empty heads at birth.

To record everything.

a reply to: Mugly

I actually met him in the Salt Lake County library about 8-10 years ago. It was quite amusing because I was on the 3rd floor sitting at my laptop trying to concentrate. There was a man standing at a large map/phone book table and he was making obnoxious noises and grunts, sometimes even yelling out loud to himself in gibberish. I was getting quite peeved as a librarian would occasionally stop by and just say hi to him. Never asking him to quiet down or leave.

I was on the verge of standing up to complain to someone in charge when a gaggle of school children were herded into the area and surrounded him. I watched with fascination as each in turn told Kim their parents names or their address or their phone number and by memory Kim would, in reply, tell them in turn their address, phone number, name, ssn number if available....any information that he had gleaned over the years through phone books, maps etc.

It was in this moment of awe when I connected the dots to the Rainman movie and realized who this man was. I spent the next half of an hour just watching the spectacle. His mother (I assume) then came up to him and told him that it was time to go. When he was with the children he seemed so honestly happy and at peace. He smiled often and laughed at silly knock knock jokes given to him.

I learned a lesson that day, truly. You probably know what that lesson is. Yup, you got it. Keep my name out of phone books.

-Rail

a reply to: intrptr

can you explain to me how having a memory or a fact pop up after some sort of cue is the same as kim peek being able to recall facts like he does?

i really dont care enough to argue it but i am curious as to how you think it is the same.


i mean sure, maybe the brain does store all these facts but another fact is we can not recall them whenever we want with accuracy and clarity like kim peek could.

recording everything and recalling everything is very different

a reply to: Mugly

can you explain to me how having a memory or a fact pop up after some sort of cue is the same as kim peek being able to recall facts like he does?

Like he does? He has read twenty thousand books ? How do we know his recall is perfect? They ask him whats on page twenty nine and he recalls it. Thats a prompt to remember the past and we all have some varying ability in this regard. My point is everyones memory is intact. Why is it being stored in that kind of accurate frame work unless its forever?

i mean sure, maybe the brain does store all these facts but another fact is we can not recall them whenever we want with accuracy and clarity like kim peek could.

Not now, maybe.

But it is there. You will have it forever. You will have perfect access to it one day.

a reply to: Mugly

Kim would have known the night of June 3, 1947 was also Tuesday, interesting.