Try Reading This One Eye At A Time

Kim Peek died on December 19 at age 58. Mr. Peek was a megasavant who inspired Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie, Rain Man.

According to the Time article on his death, "he could read both facing pages of a book - one with each eye - in seconds and could instantly tell you everything from the day of the week for a bygone date to esoteric facts about sports history or Shakespeare's canon."

"Savant" is French for "skill." Savants use to be called "Idiot Savants." Idiot is the French word for "unlearned," so with idiot savants you have "unlearned skills." "Idiot" has come to have other primary meanings today, so we now use the term, "Austic Savant" because most savants are also autistic.

Rewind to, "he could read both facing pages of a book - one with each eye."

That ability was based on a birth defect. He was born without a corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connects the brain's two hemispheres so they can communicate with each other.

Roger Sperry became famous in the 1970s for severing a cat's corpus callosum, covering one of it's eyes and teaching it to navagate a maze. He then moved the eye-patch to the cat's other eye and the cat did not recognize the maze. That became known as "split-brain" research and resulted in people being described as either "right-brained" (artists or women) or "left-brained" (accountants or men). That is over-statement, of course, but is based on the physiology of the brain.

The optic nerve from each eye splits at the optic chiasm and goes to both hemispheres. The hemispheres share information through the corpus callosum. When it is severed or, as in Mr. Peek's case, missing, the two hemispheres have to work independently. The result in Mr. Peek was that he could process the information from both eyes at once because each eye was using a different hemisphere.

The down side of his birth defect? According to his obituary, "He never learned to brush his hair or button his shirt without help."