When the screenwriter for the movie tried to get Peek to enter a casino to try the experiment in real life, Kim refused, feeling that it would be unethical. The scene from Rain Man where Raymond hits it big at the Vegas blackjack tables never happened in real life, but Kim did read a book on card counting and had all the mental faculties to perform that feat… but even savants know right from wrong. An impressive feat of memory, but not something that went over well with the Shakespeare in the Park crowd. When a thespian deviated, even slightly, from the original work, Kim would stand up mid-performance to correct them. He also enjoyed going to performances of Shakespeare’s plays, but there was a problem… not all of the actors could remember their lines as perfectly as Kim did. Kim loved Shakespeare and with his high-speed reading skills didn’t have any trouble absorbing the entirety of the Bard’s body of work.
And not just for modern persons… Kim could tell you in a second that Isaac Newton was born on a Sunday-but also, interestingly, that his birthday was both Christmas Day 1642 and January 4, 1643, since two competing calendars were in use at the time.Įven better, Peek could instantly provide any other notable events that might have happened on the same day from his recall of newspaper headlines and other historical reading. Figuring Out What Day Anyone’s Birthday Was On.Using a combination of his near-perfect recall and his prodigious mathematical calculating abilities, Kim could calculate the best routes in his head in an instant, years before anybody thought to put a computer on the job. Providing Instant Driving Directions Between Any Two Cities In The Worldīefore Google Maps could do it, Kim could.Īmong his other reading materials at the library, he absorbed maps, atlases, and travel guides.He became known for going through the better part of the entire catalog of books in the Salt Lake City Library reading everything he could get his hands on. Peek could open a book and read each of the two facing pages at the same time – the left eye reading the left page, the right eye reading the right one, effectively absorbing both pages at once.Įven thick books were filtered into his brain in under an hour using this technique. One reason Kim was able to provide so much detail and depth from his voluminous memory was that he could speed-read anything put in front of him.