I read for a second time today an article about an amazing person nicknamed Kim-puter.
Kim is a 50-something savant with amazing powers of recall across a broad spectrum. He can’t tie his own shoes or button his own shirt but he can instantly recite and sometimes correlate information from 9,000 books he’s committed to his photographic memory. He was the inspiration behind the movie “Rain Man” but his mental prowess goes far beyond what the movie portrayed. He started memorizing books that were read to him at 18 months of age.
His brain has been imaged in 3D with MRI scans and is of highly unusual construction. It is quite large, in the 99th percentile as far as size goes. It is completely missing the corpus callosum, anterior commissure, and posterior commissure. Those three structures connect the left and right hemispheres of the brain. That may or may not be relevant as people with severed hemispheres range from normal to highly impaired. The cerebellum, responsible for many motor functions, is shrunken and malformed (which explains why he can’t tie his own shoes).
Interestingly, and most uncharacteristic of savants, is that Kim has recently learned to PLAY music like a virtuoso. His extraordinary mental ability has always extended to being able to memorize musical scores on just one hearing, and he can listen to a piece he’s never heard before and usually name its famous composer, but he’s now playing on the piano what he has in holds in his head. He’s also able to, on the fly, adapt other concerto instruments to the piano, playing them with one hand while playing the original piano score with the other. His music teacher holds out the expectation that Kim will soon learn how to compose original scores.
Of course this is just a fluke mutation and serves to illustrate the awesome things that random mutation can accomplish in one fell swoop. And if you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to offer for sale to you.