Amid the ensuing spate of newspaper articles and radio interviews following the success of my pi record attempt came an offer from a major TV channel in the U.K. to commission a one-hour documentary program around my story, to be screened in Britain and the United States the following year. The program makers had been impressed by the footage they had seen of me in Oxford and especially by my ability to cope well with the public and media interest in me. They were planning to go to America later in the year to film Kim Peek, the savant who was the real-life inspiration behind the Rain Man film character, and believed that my ability to articulate my own experiences as a savant would make me an accessible point of focus for the program. Besides meeting Kim face to face, there would also be the opportunity for me to meet some of the world’s leading scientists and researchers in savant syndrome, both in the United States and Britain. It seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime.
I agreed to take part, though I was very anxious. I had not been outside the U.K. for five years (nor in that time scarcely even outside my hometown) and the prospect of several weeks far away from home, traveling and filming, daunted me. I worried whether I would be able to cope with the demanding travel schedule without my usual routines or counting rituals. I had never been to America before (though I could recite the dates, middle names and party affiliation of every president from McKinley onwards) and did not know how I would find it: what if it was too big, too flashy, too noisy for me? What if I felt overwhelmed and panicked in this vast country an ocean away from home?
The thought of constantly being on the move, from day to day and location to location, was the biggest concern for my family, Neil and me. Though supportive, they urged me to talk things over with the production team. In the conversations I had with the team I was reassured that they would ensure I was never left alone in a public place (where I might get lost) and that the filming would not be intrusive, but would capture events as they happened.
The schedule set by the team was ambitious: we were to zigzag from coast to coast over the period of two weeks with points of call en route as diverse as San Diego, California, and Salt Lake City, Utah. The program makers very quickly came up with the working title Brainman—a pun on the Dustin Hoffman film—that though at first I disliked, over time I grew to accept.
I met the crew for the first time a week before the trip in July 2004. They were friendly and helped put me at ease. The cameraman, Toby, was the same age as me. Everyone was excited—this was a completely different kind of program for the crew and they did not quite know what to expect. I was excited too, in part because they were excited and I take a lot of my emotional cues from the actions and reactions of those around me. I also felt happy inside; a new adventure was beginning.
I finished packing my bags the evening before the flight: one coat, two pairs of shoes, four sweaters, six pairs of shorts and trousers, eight T-shirts, eleven pairs of socks and underwear, a fresh tube of toothpaste, electric toothbrush, cleanser, essential oils, shower gel and shampoo. Neil purchased a mobile phone for me so we could stay in touch while I was away. His work prevented him from coming with me. I kept the phone in my right pocket and my passport, ticket and wallet in my left.
Neil drove me to the airport and hugged me before I entered the terminal. This would be the first time in three and a half years that we would be apart. Even so, I did not realize that I should show any emotion and the hug startled me. Inside the terminal building there were lots of people with luggage. They were moving around me on all sides and I began to feel anxious, so I started to count the people in the queues and felt better. The crew had already arrived and we eventually made our way over to the waiting area and then on to the plane.
It was a typically warm and clear summer day and I watched from my seat as the blue sky disappeared below clouds as we soared high into the air. An announcement from the pilot told us that the flight time was eleven hours to Los Angeles International Airport. Whenever I am given a time estimate, I visualize it in my head as a length of dough across a table, which I picture as being an hour long. For example, I am able to understand how long a thirty-minute walk will take by imagining a piece of dough rolled out to halfway across my mental table. But eleven hours was an unprecedentedly long period of time for me and I found it impossible to picture in my mind. This made me very nervous and I squeezed my eyes shut very tight, then opened them slowly and looked down at my feet until I felt calmer.
I like to prepare myself mentally for an upcoming event, to rehearse the different possibilities or permutations in my mind because of the way I become uncomfortable when something happens suddenly or unexpectedly. I knew that a point would come on board when a steward would approach and ask me something (about my choice of meal, for example) so I pictured the steward standing over me and talking to me. In my mind, I pictured myself calm and answering without difficulty.
My hands hovered continuously around my pockets, checking for the hundredth time that my phone was in my right pocket and my passport and wallet in my left. As I heard the rattling of trolleys approaching my seat, I could feel myself becoming more and more tense and vigilant. I do not like surprises. I listened carefully to some of the stewards’ conversations with the other passengers so that I knew what the steward would say to me. I had my choice ready in my mind: chicken and dumpling stew. The trolley came and went without a hitch. And I’d made a good choice.
I remained too anxious to sleep during the flight. Instead, I read the flight magazine and listened to music through the plastic headphones provided. As we eventually came in to land I could not help but feel an unmistakable sense of achievement: I had made it. My head hurt and my arms and legs were stiff, but I was in America.
Outside, the weather was clear and warmer than it had been in London. I waited while the director organized a rental car. After it came, the crew piled the luggage and many boxes full of camera and recording equipment into the back. It was like watching a game of Tetris. After several attempts, they finally managed to make everything fit. The drive took us to San Diego and a hotel next to the sea. Though exhausted, I was told we were due for an early start the next day. Inside my hotel room I brushed my teeth methodically, washed my face with my usual (five) number of splashes of water at the sink and set the alarm for 4:30 a.m. before climbing into bed and falling—immediately—into a deep sleep.
As the alarm screeched to life, I jumped up and covered my ears with my hands. My head was hurting and I was unused to the sound of an alarm clock. I fumbled with one hand until I found the right switch and brought the room back to silence. It was still dark outside. I brushed my teeth for exactly two minutes and then showered. I did not like that everything in the room was different. The showerhead was larger, the water felt heavier as it fell onto my head and the texture of the towels felt strange. Once dry, I rushed into my clothes; they at least felt and fitted how I knew they would. With considerable trepidation, I made my way slowly out of the door and down a flight of stairs to the breakfast room below. I waited for Toby to arrive, a familiar face, before sitting down and beginning to eat. I ate a muffin with some tea and after the others had come down and finished eating we clambered into the car and drove out to a large number of tall buildings with sparkling windows. We were to meet the acclaimed neurologist Professor Ramachandran and his team at California’s Center for Brain Studies.
The scientists came out to greet us as we arrived. We were taken to the professor’s office, past corridors that shone with the bright sunlight that poured in from the windows fitted all along one side. The office was large, darker than the corridors that led to it, with walls filled with tightly knit rows of books, and a heavy-set table covered with plastic models of brains and sprawling sheets of paper. I was beckoned over to a chair opposite the professor and one of his team members.
When the professor spoke, his voice boomed. In fact everything about him seemed somehow loud—his big, round eyes and thick, curly black hair and mustache. I remember thinking how large his outstretched hands appeared to me. His enthusiasm was obvious and somehow helped to put me at ease. Though I felt nervous, there was a shiver of excitement too.
I was asked to do some calculations in my head while the professor’s assistant checked my answers with a calculator. My head was still hurting from the jet lag, but fortunately I was still able to do the scientists’ sums. They then read out a list of numbers and asked me to say whether each was prime or not. I got every one right. I explained how I saw the numbers in my head as colors, shapes and textures. The professor seemed both intrigued and impressed.
At lunch, the professor’s assistant, a young man called Shai with jet-black hair and big, round eyes, like the professor’s, escorted me to a cafeteria on the center’s campus. Shai was fascinated by my descriptions of how I visualized numbers and the answers to different calculations in my head. Later, I was called to another room where I met another of Professor Ramachandran’s team members, Ed. Shai and Ed wanted to know more about the specific visual experiences I had for different numbers. It was hard to find the words to describe them, so I picked up a pen and started to draw the shapes of the numbers they asked about on a whiteboard. The scientists were stunned. They had not anticipated that my experiences were as complex as they now appeared, nor that I would be able to demonstrate them in such detail.
The scientists’ reaction took everyone by surprise. They asked the director if they could have more time to study some of my specific abilities and my visual experiences of numbers. The director made a call to the producer in London, who agreed.
The following day, with the cameras rolling, I was asked to go back over my descriptions and drawings of different numbers from the previous day. I walked back over to the whiteboard and gradually covered it with drawings and illustrations of how I saw various numbers and calculated sums in my head using my synesthetic shapes. I was even asked to model some of the numbers in play dough.
Then I was asked to study a computer screen filled with digits from the number pi while my fingers were wired up to a galvanic skin response meter. The scientists had secretly substituted sixes for nines at random points in the sequence and were interested to see whether the changes would trigger anything on the meter’s reading. As I looked at the numbers on the screen I started to feel uncomfortable and grimaced a lot, because I could see parts of my numerical landscapes were broken up as though they had been vandalized. The galvanic meter measured significant fluctuations, indicating that I did have a physiological response to the numbers being altered. The scientists, especially Shai, were fascinated.
Sometimes people ask me if I mind being a guinea pig for the scientists. I have no problem with it because I know that I am helping them to understand the human brain better, which is something that will benefit everyone. It is also gratifying for me to learn more about myself, and the way in which my mind works.
As my time with the scientists drew rapidly to a close on what was now an even tighter schedule than before, Shai asked if he could drive me over to the nearby cliffs to look out at the sea and watch the gliders floating in the sky above. He was keen to spend some time with me away from the crew and cameras. We walked together along the cliffs and he asked about my feelings for different numbers, making notes with a pad and pen he had brought along specially. My answers seemed to excite him even more. “Do you know, you’re a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for scientists,” he said matter-of-factly, but I did not know how to answer. I liked Shai and promised to stay in touch, which we do to this day by email.
Our next stop was Las Vegas, Nevada’s “City of Dreams” and the undisputed epicenter of the gambling world. The production had been keen to demonstrate some of my abilities in a “lighthearted” televisual approach, and this would be that stage, taking a page out of the famous sequence from Rain Man.
I had mixed feelings about this proposed sequence in the program. The last thing I wanted to do was to trivialize my abilities or reinforce the erroneous stereotype that all autistic people were like the Rain Man character. At the same time, I understood that the program needed to have some fun and visual sequences to cut between the more serious scientific ones. I enjoyed playing cards with friends and had never stepped inside a casino before in my life. Curiosity was enough to help sway me.
The heat in the Nevada air was incredible, like having a hair dryer turned up to maximum and continuously blown straight at you. Even being dressed in a light cotton T-shirt and shorts my body was quickly soaked in sweat as we waited for the rental car to take us on to the next hotel. The journey was thankfully swift and we were all grateful for the hotel lobby’s air-conditioning on arrival. Driving past the many massive, gaudy buildings had been a nauseating experience; however, the sense of relief was premature.
The sight that met us on our arrival at the hotel’s reception quickly mitigated any excitement we might have felt. The producer, having found it remarkably difficult to find a casino willing to allow television cameras in to film, had in the end settled for an establishment downtown, much smaller than its more famous casino cousins, that had enthusiastically embraced the idea and even provided our rooms free of charge. Our initial impression, however, was not good. The carpet was dirty and there was a persistent, stale smell throughout the lobby. It did not help that it took a long time, more than an hour, for the staff to organize our rooms.
However, once given our keys we found the rooms surprisingly spacious and comfortable. As night fell, I was taken down to the car and filmed as we drove down Vegas’s famous strip, bleached from all directions by dazzling casino lights. I clasped my hands tightly together and felt my body becoming tense and rigid, uncomfortable at being surrounded by so much stimulus. Fortunately the drive did not last long. We ate together at a nearby restaurant before going early to bed.
Next morning, the crew were busy for a long time setting up in a quiet section of the blackjack tables’ area before coming to collect me the next morning. The casino’s management had organized a large quantity of “play money” chips for us to use for the sequence. I met the casino’s owner and was introduced to the dealer, who quickly explained the rules of the game to me.
Blackjack is one of the most popular of the gambling card games; also known as “vingt-et-un” or “twenty-one.” The object of the game is to bet on each hand as to whether the player’s cards will beat the dealer’s hand without exceeding 21. An ace can count as either 1 or 11, while face cards (jacks, queens, kings) each score 10.
At the start of each hand, initial bets are placed and the dealer deals two cards to each player and himself. One of the two dealer’s cards is left facedown. A face card plus ace is called a “blackjack” and results in an immediate win for the holder. Otherwise, the dealer gives each player the option of asking for more cards (“hitting”) or staying with his current total (“standing” or “holding”). If a player goes over 21 (“busts”) he loses. Following the decisions of the players, the dealer reveals the hidden card and decides whether or not to draw additional cards. If he has a score lower than 17, he must draw a further card or cards until reaching a minimum total value of 17. If the dealer busts, all the remaining players win.
The practice of card counting is well known in blackjack and consists of the player mentally tracking the sequence of played cards in an attempt to gain a small advantage over the dealer, increasing a bet when the count is good (for example, when the remaining decks contain many face cards) and decreasing when it is bad. In its simplest form, card counting involves assigning a positive or negative value to each card; low-value cards, such as 2 and 3, are given a positive value, while 10s are given a negative value. The counter then mentally keeps a running tally of the point values as each card is dealt and makes regular adjustments to the overall count, taking into account the approximate number of cards still left to be dealt.
Card counting is not easy and even highly skilled practitioners only gain around 1 percent by using this method. Casinos will often ban those they suspect of card counting from their tables. Our table used an eight-deck shoe meaning that there were 416 cards in play, a number large enough to minimize any possible counting advantage.
Casinos are noisy and distracting environments in which to play, and one of the biggest challenges for me was trying to concentrate. As I sat on my stool opposite the dealer I focused on the decks of cards, watching intently as they were individually opened, shuffled and stacked ahead of the start of the game. The cameras around me attracted onlookers and I quickly had a crowd encircle me as I played.
I was to play for a preset period of time. The casino had specially reserved the table so that I was the only player. It was the dealer versus me. Wanting to develop a feel for the game, I started by making simple judgments based on the cards displayed in each hand: I would “stand” if dealt a 10 and 8 and “hit” if given a 3 and a 9 (except where the dealer showed a 4, 5, or 6, in which case I stood), a technique known as “basic strategy.”
Even when the player uses basic strategy optimally, the dealer still has a statistical advantage. Over time my stack of chips became increasingly depleted. My feel for how the cards were playing, however, was a lot better than at the start; I was making my decisions more quickly and feeling more comfortable at the table. I made a snap decision to play instinctively, going on how I was experiencing the flow of numbers in my head as a rolling visual landscape with peaks and troughs. When my mental numerical landscape peaked, I would bet more aggressively than when it ebbed.
A change occurred; I began to win more and more individual hands. I relaxed and began to enjoy the game much more than I had been. At a key point I was dealt a pair of 7s with the dealer showing a 10. Basic strategy says to hit. Instead I went with my instinct and split the pair, doubling my original bet. The dealer drew a third card, which was also a 7. I asked if I could split this 7. The dealer was surprised—this is extremely unusual play against a dealer’s 10. The card was split and I now had three hands of 7, my original bet tripled, against a 10. The audience of onlookers behind me were audibly tutting. One man behind me loudly remarked: “What’s he doing splitting 7s against a 10?” The dealer proceeded to deal out further cards on each of the three 7s—the first totaled 21. Then more cards for the second hand: another 21. Finally came the third of the 7s, and once again a winning total of 21. Three consecutive 21s in a single hand against the dealer. In one fell blow I had made up my losses and beaten the house.
I was still glad to leave Las Vegas. It was too hot, too crowded, too many flashing lights. The only time I had felt comfortable was among the cards. I was feeling increasingly homesick and after returning to the hotel phoned Neil from my room, bursting into tears at the sound of his voice. He told me I was doing fine and should carry on. He was proud of me. I was not to know then that the most important and special episode in the entire trip was just ahead of me.
We flew into Salt Lake City, capital of the state of Utah and home to the Mormon religion, the following day. It was a short drive from the hotel to the city’s public library. The building was extraordinary: six-story curving, transparent walls covering 240,000 square feet and containing more than half a million books, with shops and services at ground level, reading galleries above and a 300-seat auditorium. With my abiding love of books and memories of the years spent reading for hours in my small local libraries every day, this seemed like paradise to me.
The huge space was infused with daylight and I felt the familiar tingle of tranquility inside me. Libraries had always had the power to make me feel at peace. There were no crowds, only small pockets of individuals reading or moving from shelf to shelf or desk to desk. There was no sudden loud outburst of noise, just the gentle flicking of pages or the intimate chatter between friends and colleagues. I had never seen or been in any library quite like this before; it really seemed to me like the enchanted palace of a fairy tale.
I was asked to sit on a bench on the ground floor and wait, so I counted the rows of books and the people as they walked quietly by. I could have sat there for hours. The director came and collected me and we rode the elevator to the second floor. Here there were rows upon rows of books for as far as the eye could see. An elderly man approached and shook my hand. He introduced himself as Fran Peek, father and full-time carer of his son, Kim.
Kim Peek is a miracle. When he was born in 1951, doctors told his parents that he would never walk or learn and that they should put him in an institution. Kim was born with an enlarged head and a water blister inside his skull that damaged the left hemisphere, the side of the brain involved in such critical areas as speech and language. A 1988 scan by neuroscientists found that he had no corpus callosum, the membrane separating the brain’s two hemispheres. Yet Kim was able to read at sixteen months and completed the high school curriculum by age fourteen.
Kim has memorized a vast amount of information from more than a dozen subjects over the years, ranging from history and dates to literature, sports, geography and music. He can read two pages of a book simultaneously, one with each eye, with near perfect retention. Kim has read more than 9,000 books altogether and can recall all their content. He is also a gifted calendrical calculator.
In 1984, Kim and his father met producer Barry Morrow at a conference meeting of the Association of Retarded Citizens in Arlington, Texas. The result was the movie Rain Man. Dustin Hoffman spent the day with Kim and was so awed by his abilities that he urged Fran to share his son with the world. Since that time, Kim and his father have crisscrossed the United States and talked to more than a million people.
This was to be a moment I had long waited for; it would be the first time in my life that I had met and spoken with another savant. Fran had told his son who I was and why we were coming to meet them. The choice of the city’s public library for our meeting was a no-brainer; for both Kim and myself libraries are a special place, full of quiet, light, space and order.
After meeting Fran I was introduced to Kim. Standing close to his father, Kim was a heavyset, middle-aged figure with a mop of graying hair and piercing, inquisitive eyes. He quickly held my arms and stood very close to me. “Give him your birth date,” suggested Fran. “31 January 1979,” I said. “You turn sixty-five on a Sunday,” replied Kim. I nodded and asked for his birth date. “November 11, 1951,” he replied. I smiled broadly: “You were born on a Sunday!” Kim’s face lit up and I knew that we had connected.
Fran had a surprise for me: the Oscar won by Rain Man’s screenwriter Barry Morrow, which Morrow generously gave the Peeks to take on their speaking tours. I held the statuette carefully in both hands; it was much heavier than it looked. I was asked to sit with Fran and talk about Kim’s childhood, so we walked over to a corner with comfortable leather chairs and sat while Kim was given a book to read. Fran spoke with passion about the reaction of the doctors to his young son’s problems: “We were told to put him in an institution and forget about him.” A brain surgeon even offered to lobotomize Kim to make it easier to institutionalize him.
I wanted to know more about Kim’s life today and asked Fran to describe a typical day’s routine. “Kim speaks to his mother on the phone every morning and he comes here every day and reads for several hours. In the evenings we go visit an elderly neighbor of ours. Kim reads to her.”
I asked about Kim’s speaking tours. “We always travel together and never ask for any money. We visit places like schools, colleges and hospitals. Kim can tell them almost anything they want to know: dates, names, statistics, zip codes, you name it. The audience asks him all sorts of questions and he always comes out with so much information, more than I ever knew he knew. He hardly ever gets stuck for an answer. His message is this: ‘You don’t have to be disabled to be different, because everybody’s different.’ ”
We finished the interview and I was able to walk with Kim alone around the different shelves of the library. Kim held my hand as we walked. “You’re a savant like me, Daniel,” he said excitedly and he squeezed my hand. As we walked among the shelves I noticed that Kim would pause briefly and take a book from the shelf, flick through a few pages as if already familiar with its contents, and return it. He would sometimes murmur a name or date out loud as he read. Every book dealt with nonfiction topics; novels did not seem to interest him. It was something else that we had in common.
“What do you like doing here most, Kim?” I asked him and without saying a word he took me over to a section with rows of thick, red leather-clad books. They were phone directories for every town in Salt Lake County. Kim pulled one off the shelf and sat himself down at a nearby desk. He had a notebook and pen with him and proceeded to copy several names and numbers from the directory into his book. I watched and asked him if he liked numbers too; he nodded slowly, absorbed in his notes.
I sat with Kim and remembered that Fran had told me Kim enjoyed being given questions related to historical dates and figures. History was one of Kim’s favorite topics. “What year did Victoria become Queen of England?” I asked. “1837,” replied Kim in an instant. “How old would Winston Churchill be if he were alive today?” “One hundred thirty.” “And what day of the week would his birthday fall on this year?” “It would be a Tuesday, the last day of November.”
With Fran and the crew’s supervision we were then taken down to the library’s ground floor where Kim pointed to the different rows of shelves and explained which books they contained. We walked out into bright mid-afternoon sun and then stood, Kim once more clasping my hands in his. Standing close to me, he looked into my eyes and said: “One day you’ll be as great as I am.” It was the best compliment I had ever received.
I agreed to meet Kim and Fran later that evening for supper at a local restaurant. Kim recounted his memory of meeting Dustin Hoffman and Hoffman’s amazement at Kim’s abilities and warm character. Both father and son emphasized the importance of continuing to share Kim’s abilities and his message of respect for difference with as many people as possible.
We left Kim and Fran in Salt Lake City with considerable reluctance. Each member of the crew said how much they had taken away from the experience of meeting Kim and his father. Their story of unconditional love and of dedication and perseverance in the face of adversity was extremely inspirational. For me, it had been a simply unforgettable experience. Kim reminded me of how fortunate I was, in spite of my own difficulties, to be able to live the sort of independent life that he cannot. It was equally a joy to find someone who loved books and facts and figures as much as I did.
As we flew home, I was left with several thoughts. Kim and I had much in common, but most important of all was the sense of connection I think we both felt during our time together. Our lives had in many ways been very different and yet somehow we shared this special, rarefied bond. It had helped to bring us together and on that day we reminded one another of the extraordinary value of friendship. I had been moved by the enthusiasm with which he and his father had welcomed me and with which they had openly and candidly shared their story. Kim’s special gift is not only his brain, but also his heart, his humanity, his ability to touch the lives of others in a truly unique way. Meeting Kim Peek was one of the happiest moments of my life.