Moonwalking With Einstein (25 page)

I mentioned
Brainman
to Ben Pridmore. I was curious to know whether he’d seen it, and whether he was afraid that Daniel, someone with natural gifts that seemed to measure up to—if not surpass—Ben’s own acquired skills, might someday make an appearance on the memory circuit.

“I’m pretty sure that guy
did
compete in the championships a couple years ago,” Ben told me matter-of-factly. “But I think he had a different name. Back then he was called Daniel Corney. He did quite well one year, as I recall.”

I asked a few of the other mental athletes what they thought of Daniel. Almost everyone had seen
Brainman
, and almost everyone had an opinion. Quite a few were suspicious about his claims of savanthood, and believed he used basic mnemonic techniques to memorize information. “Any of us could do what he’s done,” the eight-time world memory champion Dominic O’Brien told me. “If you want my opinion, he simply realized he’d never be number one as a mental athlete.” O’Brien said as much on camera, when he was filmed for
Brainman
, but the producers didn’t include his interview in the final cut.

Clearly the mental athletes had plenty of reason to be envious of Daniel. His memory skills were almost exactly equivalent to theirs, and yet their respective places in the cultural firmament couldn’t have been more different. While the trained mnemonists toiled away in geeky obscurity, Daniel’s medicalized condition had generated enormous popular interest.

The next time I was in front of a computer, I logged into the memory circuit stats server. Sure enough, I found a Daniel Corney who had competed twice in the World Memory Championship, finishing as high as fourth place in 2000. It was the same Daniel, with a different surname: He’d had it legally changed in 2001. It seemed strange to me that in his memoir about his impressive memory Daniel wouldn’t have mentioned his fourth-place finish in the World Memory Championship.

I did a search for Daniel’s name in the Worldwide Brain Club, the online forum where mental athletes gather. Not only had Daniel competed in the World Memory Championship, he had actually been an outspoken critic of it, even going so far as to lay out an eight-point program for how memory sport could be made more legitimate, more popular, and attract more media attention. I was especially surprised by one of Daniel’s posts to the WWBC. It was an ad from the year 2001 in which he offered to reveal the “secrets of his ‘Mindpower formula’ in his unique ‘Mindpower and Advanced Memory skills e-mail course.’ ” What secrets were those? I wondered. And why hadn’t he shared them with me when we met?

What fascinates us and excites us about savants—the reason Daniel has received so much attention from both scientists and the public—is their otherness, and their ability to do the seemingly impossible with apparent ease. They are, in effect, aliens in our midst, walking exceptions to the natural order of the universe. As jaw-dropping as the memory tricks performed by mental athletes may be, they’re still just tricks. And like any magic trick, once you know how it’s done—and that you could do it, too—the effect loses a good bit of its luster. But savants are the real deal: For them, memory is not a trick, but a talent.

But now I was beginning to wonder if the gulf between me and Daniel—between any of us and Daniel—might not be nearly so great at it seemed. What if, as Dominic O’Brien seemed to believe, the most famous savant in the world was not a rare individual with almost mystical natural abilities but just a guy who accomplished savantlike tricks through methodical training? What, then, would be the difference between him and me?

When it comes
to savant memory, there is probably only one other human being in the same class as Brainman: Kim Peek, aka Rain Man, the prodigious savant born in 1951 who inspired Dustin Hoffman’s character in the Hollywood movie. He has arguably the best memory in the world. Now that I’d spent some time with Daniel, I decided to visit Kim in his hometown in Utah to make a comparison, to find out what the two celebrated prodigies had in common, and what they could tell me about the nature of savant syndrome.

I met Kim on a leg of what has become his endless speaking tour—on which his father and caregiver, Fran, accompanies him, and for which he never requests payment. He was addressing a group of about three dozen elderly women in the activities room at an old-age home in his hometown of Salt Lake City. Members of the audience had been invited to try to stump him with obscure trivia (anything but “logic or reasoning questions,” Fran cautioned). A woman breathing from an oxygen tank asked him about the highest peak in South America. He answered correctly—Mt. Aconcagua, a fact any mildly competent trivia buff would know—and gave its height: 22,320 feet (which, I later discovered, was off by about five hundred feet). An amputee in a wheelchair inquired how many times Easter fell in March in the 1930s. Without a pause, he responded. “March 27, 1932. March 28, 1937.” His answers ended with a quickening of his voice that sounded like it was about to explode in raucous laughter. The program director of the home asked him which books were summarized in volume 4 of
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books
from 1964. He named all five. The name of Harry Truman’s daughter? Margaret. The number of times the Steelers have won the Super Bowl? Four. The last line of Coriolanus? “Which to this hour bewail the injury, / Yet he shall have a noble memory. Assist.”

“He’s never forgotten anything,” Fran told me, including, supposedly, every fact in the more than nine thousand books he has read at about ten seconds a page. (Each eye scans its own page independently.) He’s memorized Shakespeare’s entire corpus and the scores to every major piece of classical music. At a recent staging of
Twelfth Night
, an actor transposed two lines, sending Kim into a fit of such magnitude that the house lights had to be turned on and the play suspended. He’s no longer allowed to attend live plays.

Unlike Daniel, there’s no way to look at Kim and not immediately sense that he is entirely unique. He has gray hair and a bearlike build, and squints through thick, brown plastic frames. His head is almost always tilted forty-five degrees to the side. He keeps one hand docked inside the other, and thrusts it in and out when he gets excited. Possibly the most allusive conversationalist on the planet, his mind so overflows with facts and figures that they often come out as a waterfall of apparent non sequiturs. When an Argentine woman at the old-age home told Kim that she was born in Córdoba, Kim immediately told her the major roads into and out of her hometown and then belted out the chorus of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” provoking a squirm of discomfort from me. And then out of nowhere he screamed, “You’re fired!” Fran helped him explain the connection: The basketball star Dennis Rodman, who used to date Madonna, who played Argentinean first lady Eva Perón in the movie version of
Evita
, was fired by the Los Angeles Lakers in 1999.

Kim seems to have discovered a Pavlovian association between his astounding literalness and audience laughter. At a recent talk, he responded to a question about the content of the Gettysburg Address with, “227 Northwest Front Street. But Lincoln stayed there only one night. He gave the speech the next day.” He now repeats that joke often.

Kim likes to be called the “Kimputer,” but his full name is Laurence Kim Peek. “We named him after Laurence Olivier and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim,” says Fran. When Kim was born, after a difficult pregnancy, it was immediately clear that something was deeply off. His head was a third larger than normal and sprouted a fist-size blister on its backside that the doctors were afraid to remove. For the first three years of his life, Kim dragged his head on the ground as if it were loaded with a heavy weight. He didn’t walk until he was four. His parents were urged to consider a lobotomy. Instead Kim was put on heavy sedatives until he was fourteen. Fran recalls that it was only when Kim was taken off the sedatives that he first started to show an interest in books. He’s been memorizing them ever since.

But even though Kim has access to a larger store of knowledge than perhaps anyone else on the planet, he doesn’t seem able to put it toward any end other than itself. He has an IQ of just 87. And no matter how many books of etiquette he may have memorized, his sense of what’s socially appropriate is, to put it generously, esoteric. Standing in a crowd of people in the lobby of the Salt Lake City public library, Kim wrapped his thick arms around my shoulders and gripped me against his paunch and then forcibly gyrated against me. “Joshua Foer, you are a great, great man,” he told me loudly enough to startle a passerby. “You are a handsome man. You are a man of your generation.” And then he let out a deep roar.

How Kim can do what he does is a mystery to science. Unlike Dustin Hoffman’s character in
Rain Man
, Kim is not, apparently, autistic. He’s far too sociable for that diagnosis. He’s something else entirely. In January 1989, the same week that
Rain Man
was released, a CT scan of Kim’s brain revealed that his cerebellum, an organ crucial to sensory perception and motor function, was severely distended. An earlier scan had discovered that Kim also lacks a corpus callosum, the thick bundle of neurons that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and allows them to communicate. It’s an incredibly rare condition, but how it might contribute to his savantism isn’t at all clear.

Kim and I spent the better part of our afternoon together sitting at a table in the back corner of the Salt Lake City public library’s fourth floor, where he has spent almost every weekday of the last ten years reading and memorizing phone books. He took off his glasses and laid them on the table. “I’m just going to do a little scanning,” he announced. I looked over his shoulder as he leafed through a phone book from Bellingham, Washington. I was trying to keep pace with his memory. I did what Ed would have coached me to do had he been there: I set up a memory palace and converted each person’s phone number into an image, did the same thing with the first and last name, and then quickly tried to tie all those images together in a memorable way. It was hard work, and when I tried to explain it to Kim, he didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. Every time I’d get to the fourth or fifth name in the first column, he was ready to move on to the next page. I asked him how he was able to do it so quickly. He looked up from the book and peered over his glasses, agitated by my interruption. “I just remember!” he screamed. And then he reburied his head in a column of phone numbers, and ignored me for the next half hour.

One of the challenges of developing a theory to explain savant syndrome is that it expresses itself so differently in different individuals. However, there is one neuroanatomical anomaly that turns up again and again in savants, including Kim: damage in the brain’s left hemisphere. Interestingly, the exaggerated abilities of savants are almost always in right-brain sorts of activities, like visual and spatial skills, and savants almost always have trouble with tasks that are supposed to be primarily the left-brain’s domain, such as language. Speech defects are extremely common among savants, which is part of the reason that loquacious, well-spoken Daniel seems so extraordinary.

Some researchers have theorized that shutting off certain left-brain activities somehow liberates right-brain skills that had been latent all along. Indeed, people have been known to suddenly acquire savantlike abilities later in life, after a traumatic injury to the left side of the brain. In 1979, a ten-year-old boy named Orlando Serrell took a baseball pitch to the left side of his head and came to with a remarkable capacity to calculate calendar dates and remember the weather on every day of his life. Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, studies elderly patients with a relatively common form of brain disease called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. He’s found that in some cases where the FTD is localized on the left side of the brain, people who had never picked up a paintbrush or an instrument can develop extraordinary artistic and musical abilities at the very end of their lives. As their other cognitive skills fade away, they become narrow savants.

The fact that people can become savants so spontaneously suggests that those exceptional abilities must lie dormant, to some degree, in all of us. There may be, as Treffert likes to put it, “a little Rain Man” hiding inside every brain. He’s just kept under lock and key by the inhibitory “tyranny of the dominant left hemisphere.”

Treffert further speculates that savants with exceptional memories may somehow hand over the duties of maintaining declarative memories, like facts and figures, to the more primitive nondeclarative memory systems, like those that help us recall how to ride a bike or catch a fly ball without consciously thinking about it (the same systems that allow the amnesic HM to draw in the mirror and EP to navigate his neighborhood without knowing his address). Consider how much mental processing must take place just to position one’s hand to catch a fly ball—the instantaneous calculations of distance, trajectory, and velocity—or to recognize the difference between a cat and a dog. Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can’t explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they’re happening.

But with enough effort those lower levels of cognition can sometimes be accessed. For example, when students are taught to draw, often the first two exercises they’re made to master are tracing negative space and contour lines. The aim of these exercises is to shut down the top-level conscious processing that can’t see a chair as anything but a chair, and activate the latent, lower-level perceptual processing that sees it only as a collection of abstract shapes and lines. It takes a great deal of training for an artist to learn to deactivate that top-level processing; Treffert believes savants may do it naturally.