Seeing Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man doesn’t even come close to seeing the wonder of Kim Peek, who died at 58 of a heart attack on Saturday. Ed Yeates of KSL-TV (Salt Lake City) reports on the life of the man whose brain had hemispheres that could not “speak” to one another, making simple life tasks impossible, but enabled him to have almost super-human memory recall.

Kim was a unique megasavant. He was able to recall most everything he read or heard — from zip codes to historical events — and he could do it in seconds.

In an unprecedented study in 2004, NASA scientists began studying Kim’s brain, hoping to find out why his recall continued to get better, even though he was aging.

Dr. Michael Basse, from the Salinas Valley Memorial Medical Center, said, “I cannot even imagine the depth of what we would see in Kim’s brain that would correlate with his unique abilities.”

In a documentary on Peek that I saw maybe a year ago, his elderly father, who cared lovingly for Kim until the day the savant died, took Kim around the country to meet and speak with people and demonstrate his talents; the socialization in fact helped Kim come out of his shell over time.