Introduction

Kim Peek is the inspiration behind the movie Rain Man. Despite multiple types of damage to the brain, he is one of the world's mega-savants due to his exceptional memory.

This short video briefly describes his condition:



Having read about 10 000 books over his lifetime, with the ability to recall most of this information, Kim has garnered international attention for his phenomenal memory capacity. Among other topics, he is extremely well versed in the fields of:

• History
• Sports (professional basketball, football and baseball)
• The Bible
• Movies
• Calendar Calculation
• Telephone area codes and zipcodes

Aside from that, Kim has the astonishing ability to read two pages of a book a the same time. His estimated retention of the material read is 98%. Furthermore, a page that would ordinarily take 3 minutes to read can be scanned and retained by Kim in about 10 seconds.

Peek is an endearing person who, despite having amazing memory capacity, can neither reason out mathematical problems nor understand certain concepts. One example of the latter is - he might be able to tell you about all the wars that occurred in human history, but would not understand the concept that drives their fighting.

This short interview with Richard Quest of CNN further explains Kim's phenomenal abilities.

The following pages will discuss Kim Peek’s extraordinary condition

with emphasis to his unique cognitive ability in the realm of semantic

memory.