Video narration
Picture Kim Peek reaching for a shirt button-and being unable to fasten it. That same man was reported to have memorized more than 12,000 books, word for word. Give him any date in history, and he could reportedly name its day of the week instantly. Limitless memory. Ordinary difficulty. When Kim was born in 1951, doctors saw his unusually large head, assumed severe brain damage, and advised his parents to place him in an institution. They were wrong about what he could do. But the story flips here: this was not simply a better brain. Kim was born without the corpus callosum, the thick bridge of nerve fibers that normally connects the brain's left and right hemispheres. Without that usual bridge, the two sides had a radically different way of working together. It does not explain every talent or difficulty. Kim's brain was radically different: extraordinary in some ways, limited in others.