Kim Peek, aka Rain Man Focus of NASA Study 366
Bob Vila's Hammer writes "Kim Peek - an autistic man who has been deemed a "mega-savant" for his astonishing knowledge of 15 grand subjects ranging from history and literature, geography and numbers, to sports, music and dates - is a part of a new NASA study to explore the changes in his brain since MRI images were originally taken in 1988. Not only was he the basis of the main character in the movie Rain Man, but he apparently is getting smarter in his specialty areas as he gets older. The study has scientists hoping that technology used to study the effects of space travel on the brain will help explain his mental capabilities."
Kim Peek not "autistic" (Score:5, Informative)
The above article [wisconsinm...ociety.org] and the brief wikipedia story [wikipedia.org] are very interesting reads. For example, did you know that Kim was born with "an enlarged head and missing corpus callosum, the connecting tissue between the brain hemispheres, damage to the cerebellum and no anterior commissure"?
Re:Kim Peek not "autistic" (Score:5, Informative)
According to this artice [msn.com], "tests showed his brain hemispheres are not separated, forming a single, large 'data storage' area" (emphasis added).
Re:conspiracy theory 26 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:At the risk of sounding.... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:so, where's the beef (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Kim Peek not autistic, just a savant (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Kim Peek not "autistic" (Score:5, Informative)
This is true, but it's worth noting that the movie was based around Kim Peek. I've actually met Kim Peek (and his father, Kim didn't live by himself at the time), he's quite a fellow. Apparently Kim was having trouble getting medical care due to both insurance indifference and government beaurocracy, and Dustin Hoffman (who played the savant in the movie) moved mountains to help out Kim. I've also met people with classic autism -- while a psycologist may differ on the strictness of the definition, to the layman it's the same thing. Still, the opprotunity for education is appreciated.
It's still neat to ask Kim about a little blink-by-town in the middle of nowhere, and he's able to tell you about the area with enough detail that it seems as if he's been there before. (He liked to study maps at one point in time, and no matter how long ago it was, he still remembers perfectly). As long as we stayed in the guidelines set by his father (mainly talking about Kim's areas of interest -- and hence knowledge), he played a perfect game of 'stump the dummy.' (The term originates from one of my engineering professors, referring to Q&A sessions where students ask him questions about their homework, and has nothing to do with Kim Peek. Half the fun of the game was getting the professor to say "I don't know". When talking to Kim Peeks, this never happened.)
It'll be interesting ot see what the study finds.
Re:Kim Peek not autistic, just a savant (Score:2, Informative)
1. Qualitative impairment in social interaction, manifest by at least two of the following:
A. Marked impairment in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors, such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body postures and gestures, to regulate social interaction
B. Failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level
C. Lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., by lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest)
D. Lack of social or emotional reciprocity
C&D can often be seen by others as being cold or not loving. However, one could technically be autistic by exhibiting A&B while seeking to share enjoyment and having emotional reciprocity.
Re:Kim Peek not "autistic" (Score:5, Informative)
For starters, metal poisoning does NOT always imply lack of metallothionein or autistic behavior, and only mercury poisoning would somewhat approach autism symptoms... superficially!
Also autism does not always mean metal poisoning. Some autistics have simply not been exposed to enough metals to be poisonned and they're quite autistic - the poison dart frog active substance in their blood and all that without metal poisoning. Autistics with the least metal poisoning have a tendency NOT to be deficient in sulfur like 75% of autistics (in a study by Dr. Waring). Sulfur deficiency is a marker of mercury poisoning, as mercury has affinity for most sulfur groups in the body and therefore damages sulfur metabolism.
The MMR vaccine is the only vaccine to have a serious connection to autism, but it's like 0.04% of cases and not 99% as Wakefield believed at some point... and it's a delayed effect. Other vaccines don't CAUSE autism, but could certainly account for chance of early diagnosis because of plainly obvious mercury damage and ADD/dyslexia type problems.
Difference between autistic children of today with the next generation of children that are now on non-mercury (but aluminium preservative) vaccines is gonna be quite instructive, look for it when it shows up...
The mercury poisoning (quite a common disease among autistics with mercury fillings) is but one of the issues (lead and arsenic kills people too, you know). You CAN'T de-autistify someone with chelation, but curing metal poisoning can raise their IQ just like in non-autistic who are lead poisonned. Then they don't SEEM autistic as much, but still function extremely differently from other people when you look at the details.
In short, high IQ allows autistics to "pretent to be normal" by learning normal behavior and acting it with good actor skills. You can find all about it in a book called "pretending to be normal".
By the way, here is another savant (with autistic traits, but possibly not completely autistic). This one is a top 10 mathematician in history according to many.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdos
Some autistic links: neurodiversity.com
I recommend the neurodiversity.com section called "murder of autistics" for a good, true, opinion-diverse, very disturbing read.
Why it's important if he's smarter with age (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Kim Peek not "autistic" (Score:3, Informative)
Appear to whom? This has not been born out by studies. Currently the only evidence in support of the metal poisoning theory I've seen are from people selling chelation therapy. If you know of any scientific studies to support this I'd love to see them.
Re:Intellignece (Reasoning vs. Knowledge) (Score:3, Informative)
I know more about intelligence and working memory than autism in general and autistic savants in particular.
However, there is one absolutely fascinating case -- Temple Grandin. She is autistic, but incredibly high functioning. She has a Ph.D and is a leader in animal ethonology. This sounds like a bullshit field, but here's the payoff: she's the world's leading designer of livestock handling equipment. Meating processing plants are pretty inhumane places. She designs the part where the livestock are unloaded from trains and trucks, penned up, and then ushered to the place where the killing happens. Her designs somehow put the animals at ease. I know, I know, it sounds weird. She somehow has high empathy for the beasts, which is especially impressive given that autistics often have profound problems negotiating even trivial social situations.
I don't know about Kim Peek, but I would classify Grandin as a designer of the highest caliber. I encourage you to spend some time learning about her. Just Google for "Temple Grandin Autism" and you'll be on your way.
Re:Smarter or more knowlegeable? (Score:4, Informative)
Your argument is not correct.
The paradox of the expert is this: How can experts have both (1) more knowledge of a domain and (2) faster access to each element of that knowledge?
Cognitive psychologists began answering this question forty years ago, with De Groot's work in the 1960s and Chase and Simon's work in the early 1970s on chess experts. The answer is to notice that the acquisition of knowledge is typically accompanied by the acquisition of better indices on that knowledge. Or, said another way, you get credit for knowing something when (1) you have stored it somewhere in your long-term memory and (2) you can recall it when it is appropriate. Research since the 1970s has applied these early insights to many other domains besides chess, such as reading X-rays.
Another way to think of this is that memories are more akin to hashtables than trees or lists. With the right hash function (i.e., indexing scheme), any single item can be retrieved in constant time. [Think also of radix sort versus comparison-based sorting algorithms.]
Re:Moral point of view (Score:3, Informative)
Or corrupt prophets trying to put words in the mouth of God, or Lot's daughters getting him stone drunk and sleeping with him, or Moses murdering the Egyptian man, or David abusing his position as King to get a woman to sleep with him when her husband was away (and then getting her husband killed when he was in danger of being found out).
I'm not sure it's the best comparison to make the point you're making, though. The thing to realize is that an awful lot of these things weren't even acceptable in the culture of the day, either. Someone being mentioned in the Bible doesn't automatically constitute an endorsement of their behavior; very often these Old Testament things are in part cautionary tales, going on to show that the same people invariably suffered the consequences of their actions. Even when occasionally the original author of a section does appear to have approved, the consequences are still plain for later readers to see.
Even the polygamy of some Old Testament figures (which was quite acceptable in the culture of their own times) were shown to have adverse consequences for them, their wives, and their descendants. Abraham's experiment in polygamy established two rival claims to the middle east by descendants of his two children; Ishmael (ancestor of the Arab people) and Isaac (ancestor of the Jewish people). With Jacob, in turn, his wives and family suffered as he invariably played favorites and bitter rivalries developed. With that and other examples it's little wonder the Jewish tradition gradually realized polygamy might be a bad idea. The culture permitted David a lot more leeway as King in that regard, but reading the whole store you're left with the sense that perhaps it shouldn't have.
As for Noah.. I guess that mostly just comes down to a rather embarassing family memory and a lesson in responsible drinking. Just imagine coming home from a night out with your brothers to find your centenarian father passed out drunk and naked in the middle of the tent. Or don't. Not the best mental image. :P Probably everybody laid off the alcohol for a while after that one.
These were the stories of the people and situations from which "today's moral values," to the extent that they have "Judeo-Christian" roots, ultimately emerged. "Today's moral values" in that sense are probably closer to "lessons learned".
I think it is an attempt to suggest a notion of morality that doesn't depend on a single culture's ideals. These folks did screw up, whether or not their actions were culturally acceptable to their contemporaries. They hurt themselves, and they hurt other people. But there is another point also; the God described is one that was still willing to deal with them, if they were willing repent and deal with Him. More than caution, it does try to offer some hope, too.
Re:Kim Peek not "autistic" (Score:1, Informative)
From J Child Neurol. 2004 Jun;19(6):431-4.
Mercury exposure in children with autistic spectrum disorder: case-control study.
Ip P, Wong V, Ho M, Lee J, Wong W.
Division of Neurodevelopmental Paediatrics, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Although mercury has been proven to be a neurotoxicant, there is a lack of data to evaluate the causal relationship between mercury and autism. We aim to see if there is increased mercury exposure in children with autistic spectrum disorder. We performed a cross-sectional cohort study over a 5-month period in 2000 to compare the hair and blood mercury levels of children with autistic spectrum disorder (n = 82; mean age 7.2 years) and a control group of normal children (n = 55; mean age 7.8 years). There was no difference in the mean mercury levels. The mean blood mercury levels of the autistic and control groups were 19.53 and 17.68 nmol/L, respectively (P =
There's another good article (J Child Neurol. 2004 Jun;19(6):413-7.) where they look at the actual genetic polymorphisms of genes normally involved in metal transport in the body. Out of all the genes they looked at, 2 (!) were found to be different between autistic families and regular families. One of them wasn't even significantly different (p=0.07).
To basically draw the conclusion that all autism is caused by heavy metal poisoning is totally space-case. It may be involved, but clearly the research is still in its infancy (there aren't even any Cochrane Reviews out on the subject), and until it's published, DON'T QUOTE IT!
Re:Kim Peek not "autistic" (Score:5, Informative)