Kim Peek (1951-2009) is the case that tests the chapter's argument at a different edge from Ramanujan's, because Peek's discovery specialty arrived without the integrative cognitive apparatus that the other cases in this section had available to complement it. Peek was born in Salt Lake City with multiple severe neurological differences: agenesis of the corpus callosum (the major white-matter structure connecting the brain's two cerebral hemispheres was absent from birth in Peek's case), macrocephaly, an encephalocele at the back of his skull, and several cerebellar anomalies. His motor coordination was impaired throughout his life. He could not button his own shirts without help. He had difficulty with stairs. His IQ on standardized tests was measured at approximately 87, which in the terminology of the era placed him in the "low-normal" range — well below what the chapter has treated elsewhere as the baseline cognitive architecture of the discovery specialty. He was not autistic, despite the common cultural association with the Rain Man character who was loosely based on him. His actual diagnostic picture never resolved cleanly into any one named syndrome because the specific combination of abilities and limitations his neurology produced did not match any recognized diagnostic category during his lifetime.
What Peek had instead was an extraordinary memory of a kind almost no other documented human case has matched. By the age of sixteen to twenty months, according to his father Fran Peek's detailed biographical account, he had memorized every book that had been read to him. By adolescence, he was reading two pages at a time — left eye on the left page, right eye on the right page, each eye reading independently — at roughly ten seconds per two-page spread, with subsequent assessments indicating approximately 98% retention of everything he read. Over the course of his adult life he read and memorized the contents of approximately 12,000 books, across subjects including American and British history, American literature, the Bible, Mormon church history, geography, classical music, Shakespeare, baseball statistics, film, and the complete telephone directories of dozens of American cities. He could tell you, on hearing any date, which day of the week it had fallen on across a span of centuries. He could tell you the highway routes between any two American cities, often with the mileage. He could name the composer, date, and key of most classical music pieces played to him. He was the real-life inspiration for the character Raymond Babbitt in the 1988 film Rain Man.
Peek's discovery specialty was, specifically, an extraordinary capacity for retention and recall across a vast range of subject matter. It was not matched by an integrative capacity that would have allowed him to produce original work on the content he had memorized. He could tell you everything the twelve thousand books contained. He could not, on his own, synthesize that content into new arguments or theoretical positions that the books themselves did not already contain. The integrative operation that would have converted the memorized material into original output required a cognitive apparatus Peek did not have. His father Fran Peek played a substantial integrative role — arranging public appearances, managing his schedule, structuring his environment, co-authoring a book about Kim's life called The Real Rain Man — but the full integration work of turning Peek's memorized content into published original output was never done, because the institutional infrastructure for that kind of collaboration did not exist during Peek's lifetime. Peek toured the United States giving public demonstrations of his memory capacity for audiences of schoolchildren, parents of children with disabilities, neurologists, and anyone else his father thought could benefit from meeting him. He was, by all accounts from the people who knew him personally, well-loved, well-supported by his father, happy within his own experience, and generous with his attention. He died of a heart attack in 2009 at fifty-eight.