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Kim Peek

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Re: Kim Peek

#31

Post by jcutrell »

unkulunkulu wrote: post #28
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #21

As far as I know, Kim Peek has never made any scientific discoveries, or had any wisdom to tell the world, in spite of being able to remember ~12k books. It's a good reminder that knowledge does not equal intelligence or wisdom.

Did he understand those books? Was he able to present the premises, propositions and arguments from those books or just to recite them? The latter does not constitute even knowledge, just memory.

For most (not Peek), memory and knowledge are necessarily linked since memory tends to work better when there is a previously existing connection to attach a new piece of information to.

So, we don't tend to remember facts for the sake of facts. This obviously isn't always true, but for vast amounts of information, it would be very difficult to remember single "nodes" of information without having some connection to other information.

Memory contestants use this to their advantage, by creating some sense of story and/or place to attach the otherwise arbitrary information, like digits or cards, to.

Re: Kim Peek

#32

Post by vinceguidry »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #21

As far as I know, Kim Peek has never made any scientific discoveries, or had any wisdom to tell the world, in spite of being able to remember ~12k books. It's a good reminder that knowledge does not equal intelligence or wisdom.

Scientific discovery may have been in the realm of individual accomplishment 200 years ago, now it requires organization. I wouldn't let this fact color your judgment.

I'm sure he could have done a PhD like anyone else.

Re: Kim Peek

#33

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

ggm wrote: post #12
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #7

>> Peek read by scanning the left page with his left eye, then the right page with his right eye. According to an article in The Times newspaper, he could accurately recall the contents of at least 12,000 books.[6] These are pretty extraordinary claims and I'm curious to know whether they were ever tested in controlled conditions. For example, how does one verify the recollection of the contents of "at least" 12,000…

I grew up in a house of books and have lived with a bookseller for most of my life. Having therefore owned and lived with 10,000 to 15,000 books, periodicals and related ephemera (catalogues, concordance &c) I can assure you I cannot recall even fractional amounts of most of these although I can recall significant amounts of many and quite inaccurately quote some small amount. So I too think the question demands test…

I know that calculating what day it was on a given date is a common mnemonic trick, e.g. see [1]. It's not easy to do but a person well-trained in mental arithmetic and memorisation should be able to pull it off.

I didn't know about recalling trains timetables and I can't find any pointers online. Can you point to a source explaining how it's done? I always like to impress at parties :)

Btw, the fact that Peek demonstrated common mnemonic skills that don't require unique abilities to perform casts further doubt on the fact that he had such unique abilities.

_____________

[1] https://artofmemory.com/blog/how-to-calculate-the-day-of-the...

Re: Kim Peek

#34

Post by McKayDavis »

I recall seeing Kim Peek many times in the old downtown Salt Lake City library in the late 80s. I always saw him camped out at some table near the reference section under the escalators on the main floor. He would usually have a stack of phone books (The White Pages) from around the country and spend hours methodically scanning and memorizing every page.

Re: Kim Peek

#35

Post by kiba »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #21

As far as I know, Kim Peek has never made any scientific discoveries, or had any wisdom to tell the world, in spite of being able to remember ~12k books. It's a good reminder that knowledge does not equal intelligence or wisdom.

Well, scientific discoveries required creativity and innovation, not just intelligence. At least, some of them probably do.

Re: Kim Peek

#36

Post by itronitron »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #21

As far as I know, Kim Peek has never made any scientific discoveries, or had any wisdom to tell the world, in spite of being able to remember ~12k books. It's a good reminder that knowledge does not equal intelligence or wisdom.

Or if he did, he never bothered to tell anyone.

Re: Kim Peek

#37

Post by MagnumPIG »

kiba wrote: post #35
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #21

As far as I know, Kim Peek has never made any scientific discoveries, or had any wisdom to tell the world, in spite of being able to remember ~12k books. It's a good reminder that knowledge does not equal intelligence or wisdom.

Well, scientific discoveries required creativity and innovation, not just intelligence. At least, some of them probably do.

In Kuhn's main book (scientific revolutions), he mentions creativity as vital to discoveries, multiple times. Not sure if intelligence is ever mentionned, but I doubt it because it can't be defined in a useful way.

Re: Kim Peek

#38

Post by narrator »

mlguide wrote: post #30
riffraff wrote: post #8

I recall seeing him for the first time in a documentary about Daniel Tammet[0]. Seeing him read books by basically just scanning two pages at once was astonishing. If I recall correctly, his father mentioned he had recently started to understand and tell jokes, which I found interesting, and somehow moving. And on a side note, after seeing "the original", Dustin Hoffman's interpretation in Rain Main felt way more pre…

It is worth noting that Tammet is widely believed to use regular mnemonic techniques: https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/ask-a-memory-champion/28565/... "I’m a bit surprised by Helix’s idea that answering this question might get me into trouble, because it’s not something that’s debated among the people who go to competitions. It’s well known that he uses memory techniques like a ‘regular person’ - he was a regular at t…

I know a guy who competes and does well in memory sports. I'd say he's above average intelligence for sure, maybe in the top 5%, but not some sort of extreme freak of nature. He's spent thousands of hours drilling memory techniques though. "Moonwalking with Einstein" is a good book about memory sports and has an intro to some of the basic techniques. From what I've seen, it's really about deepening a set of specialized ruts in the road in the brain around remembering numbers and other things that memory sports athletes compete on. It's essentially building custom designed specialized neural networks in the brain through thousands of hours of drilling.

One thing I told my nephew is that he can spend thousands of hours playing video games and then have his head full of video game trivia or he can spend thousands of hours learning to program or learning memory sports techniques and have almost as much fun, but instead wind up with something that he can actually use later in his life that doesn't involve working for a video game company.

Re: Kim Peek

#39

Post by dahart »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #21

As far as I know, Kim Peek has never made any scientific discoveries, or had any wisdom to tell the world, in spite of being able to remember ~12k books. It's a good reminder that knowledge does not equal intelligence or wisdom.

This is a natural reaction and it’s common for people to remark on his high memory yet low cognition, but nonetheless this comment somewhat bothers me. This is my issue, not yours, and I may be misinterpreting, but here’s my thinking...

Why is scientific discoveries even something he’s compared against? What does that have to do with the post? Do all people with excessive talents of some kind have to make scientific discoveries to prove it?

How would you even presume to have any idea whether Kim had wisdom to share? Wisdom is very different from scientific discoveries, and why would anyone know that except himself or his family? How hard did you try to find whether he had wisdom to share? What if he had lots of wisdom that the rest of us couldn’t understand? Are you suggesting that someone doesn’t have wisdom unless they publish it?

Let me ask this way: do you consider yourself smart & wise? What scientific discoveries have you made, what wisdom have you told the world?

We should not draw broad conclusions about the way knowledge and intelligence work based on one person who’s in an extremely abnormal situation. In most normal people, knowledge and intelligence and wisdom are closely related, it takes knowledge (experience) to gain wisdom, it takes intelligence to formulate wisdom, and it takes wisdom to seek the kind of knowledge that can lead to intelligence. For most people, having a lot of knowledge would precipitate some wisdom automatically. Normal people spot patterns. You can’t normally have a lot of one without the others. Kim Peek is a stark outlier compared to how normal brains work.

Your comment also hints at a cultural narrative that is common but not true, where people tend to see someone with extraordinary talents and “remind” everyone that it also means there must be some extraordinary deficiencies there too, because balance. There are some people that have extreme memory and are still smarter and more accomplished than the average person. Marilu Henner is a good example of that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilu_Henner

Re: Kim Peek

#40

Post by narrator »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #21

As far as I know, Kim Peek has never made any scientific discoveries, or had any wisdom to tell the world, in spite of being able to remember ~12k books. It's a good reminder that knowledge does not equal intelligence or wisdom.

Another interesting savant with an IQ of 210:

https://www.storypick.com/kim-ung-yong/

The guy actually had a productive career as a civil engineer and had a decent publication record after being exploited as a grunt differential equation solver at NASA for 10 years while a teenager.

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