As I was surfing through the net, as I do many hours a day (:P) I found this amazing documentary about Kim Peek.Documentary check out parts 2,3,4 and 5!
Who is Kim Peek you may ask. He is a 57 years old savant and one of the most brilliant man alive today. The savant syndrome is a mental illness in wich people with development disorders have one or more areas of expertise. They are mentally retarded individuals who can make incredible things in these areas that they found interesting. This is normally associated with autism, but there cases of non autistic savants too. They can't dress themselves, or some even talk to other people, but they can draw entire cities from memory with unmatched precision, they can tell you what day of the week was your birthday (or any other day for that matter) thay can do amazing math calculations and so on.
This has always interested me a lot, you know, the way the human mind works. Some of them say they don't think about numbers they feel them, see them and smell them. They don't try to do this amazing things, they are compeled to do it by their minds! And that amazes me! I heard a doctor trying to explain the savantism and he said our brain evolved to focus on other capabilities like social awareness or language and diminished other parts like memory or math calculation capabilities. Think about this for a minute. The potencial is there! In all of our minds! Great, right?!
Kim Peek, for example, he can read a page from a book, that would take us about 3 minutes, in 8 to 10 seconds, he reads the left page with his left eye and the right page with the right one. And then, he remembers about 98.7% of that book. That's just part of what he can do. He is, easilly, one of the most astonishing human beings that ever existed!
Anyway, what really made me write this post was a quote I heard Kim say at that documentary that made me think:
"You don't have to be handicap to be different. Everyone is different".
I just liked it...
